AMERICAN LIBERAL 
EDUCATION 



ANDREW FLEMING WEST 




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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



SHORT PAPERS ON 
AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 



SHORT PAPERS ON 

AMERICAN LIBERAL 
EDUCATION 



BY 



ANDREW FLEMING WEST 

DEAN OF THE GEADUATE SCHOOL 
PKINCETON UNIVERSITY 



Si quid novisti rectius istis 
Candidus imperti : si nil, his utere mecum. 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK ----.. 1907 



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UBRARY of CONGRESS 
Tw9 CoDie? Received 

FEB 23 190r 

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cuss A/ XXC, No, 

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COPY B. 



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Copyright, 1907, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 



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Published, March, 1907 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



PREFACE 

The belief which underlies the several papers here 
collected is that the American College is the one 
thing in our higher education most worth maintain- 
ing. Its first business is to turn boys into men by 
teaching them the best things, whether hard or easy to 
learn, that they may do the best things, whether hard 
or easy to do — to show them that every difiiculty sur- 
mounted by well-directed effort means more power 
to master the greater difficulties still ahead of them — 
to reveal and embody in them the living and eternal 
standards of thought and duty. Its constant foes 
are the self-seeking commercial spirit and the spirit 
of self-indulgence; its one friend is the better self 
in every man. Amid the ceaseless assaults of ignor- 
ance, selfishness, and weakness it stands as the citadel 
of our liberal knowledge. It cannot be taken from 
without, unless it is first surrendered from within. 
It cannot be surrendered from within to the forces 
of ignorance, selfishness, and weakness, so long as its 
defenders are enlightened, unselfish, and vigorous. 

V 



Vi PREFACE 

If it is ever taken, there is little use in trying to find 
another place of sure defence. 

And when it fails, fight as we may, we die, 
And while it lasts we cannot wholly end. 

So serious, so inspiring, so necessary is the cause of 
the American College. 

Andrew F. West. 
Princeton University, 
February, 1907. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Tutot^tal System in College .... 1 

II. The CHANGiNa Conception op "The Fac- 
ulty" IN American Universities . . 25 

III. True and False Standards of Graduate 

Work 47 

IV. The Present Peril to Liberal Education 65 
V. The Length op the College Course . . 78 

VI. The American College 89 



I 

THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM IN COLLEGE ^ 

This talk, I imagine, is in a way a sequel to the paper 
and discussion to which you listened this afternoon 
on the ever old and ever new theme of the large and 
small college. Perhaps on that question there are as 
many views as there are minds that view it. Some- 
where within that region of discussion I firmly be- 
lieve lies the fate of the American college. 

The large college has had the advantage over the 
small college of more opportunities and a greater 
cosmopolitanism. The small college has had the 
following advantages over the larger college : greater 
accessibility of the opportunities to the student, 
more definite and concentrated work, and a closer 
personal touch with his professors. These inesti- 
mable advantages the larger colleges and universi- 
ties have been losing, and the great aggregate of 
students who flock to the larger centres of learning 
have been becoming less and less an organized army 

^ Revised stenographic report of a talk given at the annual 
session of the New England Association of Colleges and Prepara- 
tory Schools in Boston, October 12, 1906. 
1 



2 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

of students and more and more a mere herd. What- 
ever be the experience of other places, I have no hesi- 
tation in saying that the experience of Princeton Uni- 
versity was that with the rapid student growth there 
came to be less and less attention given to the indi- 
vidual student's needs, and more and more dispersion 
of the individual students in the masses of their fel- 
lows — so that whatever the good of the cosmopolitan 
college fellowship, and whatever good the student 
might chance to get from the larger opportunities, he 
was losing something priceless, namely, definiteness in 
his work and that close personal touch of the student 
with the master, without which the best education 
cannot be obtained and never is obtained all the way 
from the child at the mother's knee to the highest 
graduate student in the most advanced subject. Par- 
don me if I speak with some conviction on this, for I 
believe it fully. 

And to speak as briefly and plainly as I can of an 
experiment we are now making in order to recover 
what we believe to have been the priceless advantage 
of the small college and combine it with the cosmo- 
politanism, the manifold opportunity of the larger 
university, it was natural when we thought over that 
question to look back to the beginnings of the Ameri- 
can colleges, and to ask from what root we had 
sprung. And as we looked back and read the history 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 3 

of the oldest collegiate foundations, we soon discov- 
ered that one of them started with a president and 
two tutors, and another with a president and one 
tutor, and another with a president who was presi- 
dent, faculty, and tutor — all in one. But somehow 
that little relic of ancestral English education had 
been lost sight of, and we wondered whether by turn- 
ing our eyes again to the English universities, from 
which, after all, the American college system has 
sprung, we might not discover there some helpful in- 
formation. ISTaturally we turned, to make a long 
story short, to the Oxford tutorial system. 

It is not easy to understand Oxford, any more than 
it is to understand England. Oxford is not a logical, 
but an historical expression. It is full of inconsistent 
coexistences of old and new, of lingering, apparently 
obsolescent modes of behavior and thinking, side by 
side with the newest things of modern life. You look 
at an Oxford building. There will be an old piece 
of the fourteenth or fifteenth century somehow 
planted with the newer eighteenth century work ; old 
and new together, perhaps incongruous at first sight, 
and yet all blended and mellowed by the ivies and 
vines and softened by the effect of the climate. Such, 
also, is the history of Oxford in things intellectual. 
Originally a mass of Latin statutes governed the uni- 
versity, replaced in part by later statutes in English, 



4 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

some of them left with the old Latin titles — some all 
Latin, some all English, some all English but with 
the ancient head-line left, from reverence or forget- 
fulness. So if you go to the course of study you find 
still lingering mediaeval terms, the word " commence- 
ment," which we have taken, the word " respon- 
sions " — and so you might go on to the end of the 
list — side by side with the newest things. And you 
find a surging conflict of opinion, often ending in 
compromise, sometimes ending in the retreat of 
knowledge, at other times ending in the advance of 
knowledge. And so the tides of Oxford life have 
been flowing back and forth, and yet on the whole 
there is an irregularly increasing intellectual gain. 

Now, if it is not too much out of the way, I would 
like to stop an instant just to say what was the matter 
with Oxford, and how the tutorial system remedied 
that trouble. The dark age of Oxford was the eigh- 
teenth century. Eead the pages of Gibbon, Swift, 
and Adam Smith. Any one may look there and see 
how knowledge seemed to have vanished. It was a 
place of sinecures, of " licensed idleness," of indif- 
ference, of intellectual and moral decline. And yet it 
was the very time when Cambridge was at its bright- 
est intellectual eminence. At the opening of the nine- 
teenth century, it occurred to one man — a real man — 
Evesleigh, of Oriel College, that something was the 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 5 

matter. And the matter was that there was no guar- 
antee of distinction to a student who did well in his 
examinations and no mark of reproach on him if he 
did ill, and, most charmingly absurd of all, there was 
no security against collusion between the students 
and the examiners. It occurred to him that the first 
thing to do was to reform the system of examinations, 
and thus straighten out the course of study somewhat. 
He made the attempt, and was successful in introduc- 
ing a reformation of the abuses that had existed. 
Soon there sprung up in a limited but brilliant way 
an intellectual revival in Oriel College, but it did 
not sweep the university. It was one thing to reform 
examinations; it was another thing to reform pro- 
fessors and students. It was one thing to lead the 
horse to the water ; it was another thing to make him 
drink. And yet the first step in the right direction 
had been taken by abolishing evils connected with 
the system of examining and the course of study. It 
remained for Parliament fifty years later to make a 
searching investigation into the condition of the an- 
cient university to go into the reform of the profes- 
sorate and of the fellows, to redistribute the funds, 
to abolish sinecures, and to complete what Evesleigh 
at the beginning of the century had begun. 

But still only the first part of the reform was ac- 
complished, the better organization of the teaching 



6 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

staff, the course of study and the system of examina- 
tions. What difference did it make to a pleasantly 
idle student what these things were, provided he was 
not interested ? Finally — I cannot place the date of 
this, but give the tale as I remember it — it occurred 
to one man — again a real man — a young don of Ball- 
iol College, that there was no education in the best 
sense without the one-to-one contact, man to man, face 
to face. Somehow in there, in the literal handing 
on of the torch of knowledge from teacher to student, 
lay the secret. And so Mr. Jowett voluntarily took 
a few students one by one to meet him once a week 
and talk over their individual difficulties. He found 
that such and such a man was weak in his Greek syn- 
tax. He would set him a page or two of something 
to read, or to write him a little paper about it a week 
after. Another perhaps was weak in his logic, or 
some part of his logic. Another could not write his 
Latin well. Another was deficient elsewhere. He 
talked over the difficulties with each one separately, 
and made them bring him — or, rather, they were will- 
ing to bring him — each week some little attempt of 
their own to overcome their particular difficulties, and 
this attempt he would criticise and thus help to set 
them right. To make a long story short, it was soon 
evident that students taught in that way were surpass- 
ing other students of like natural ability, and after a 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 7 

brief delay — brief for Oxford — Balliol College 
ado2:>ted a tutorial system, and Jowett, the famous 
editor of Plato, became the master of Balliol. Ball- 
iol men began sweeping the honors of the university, 
and to be a Balliol man was to have the blue ribbon 
of intellectual distinction. 

The next stage was naturally that all the other col- 
leges of Oxford, in varying modes, adopted a tutorial 
plan. Although the principle on which that tutorial 
system is founded is as old as human nature, and is 
commonly supposed to be a system of teaching which 
has existed for centuries in the University of Oxford, 
it is, in fact, about the newest thing ancient Oxford 
has, the most modern thing in it as a well-tested 
actual piece of educational machinery. 

We considered the Oxford experience carefully, 
and wondered what could be done in an American 
university to produce similar results in undergradu- 
ate students. Perhaps unconsciously, perhaps in part 
consciously, we began repeating rapidly to a large 
extent the experience of the University of Oxford. 
First of all we proceeded to reform our own course 
of study. I shall not go into that subject at length. 
Courses of study, schedules of study, are perhaps as 
dry as the tariff bill or an almanac, and yet they have 
important uses. We have, however, come — and I 
will state this without debating or arguing it — to the 



8 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

following position: that in organizing your scheme 
of liberal education the four-year college course is to 
be retained at all hazards; secondly, that the earlier 
part of the course should consist mainly of prescribed 
studies of fundamental and general nature ; thirdly, 
that the latter part of the course should consist of 
studies of which a majority lie in some large depart- 
ment of the student's own choice, the remaining 
courses being free — in other words, a system of grad- 
ual and progressive election based on a prescribed 
substratum. And in doing so we organized these 
studies under three degrees : first, the historical bach- 
elor of arts degree, retained in its traditional signifi- 
cance as including a prescribed training in mathe- 
matics and science, the classical literatures, modern 
literature, and philosophy. Then two modern bach- 
elor's degrees — one the degree of bachelor of science, 
a specifically modern liberal degree for those whose 
main studies lie in the scientific direction, and the 
other the bachelor of letters, a specifically modern 
liberal degree for those whose studies lie mainly in 
the humanistic direction. In that way we believe we 
accommodate nearly all persons who may properly 
ask to receive a bachelor's degree of any kind in lib- 
eral studies at the close of a four-year college course. 
Then the question at once arose. How shall we not 
only bring the course of study to the student, but do 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 9 

the second thing, bring the student to the course of 
study ? Let me speak on that as my principal theme 
to-night. The first thing to be done was to find the 
means necessary to secure the proper men to do that 
highly important work. President Woodrow Wilson 
at once appealed to the alumni of the university 
to give $2,500,000, not for bricks and mortar, not 
for stained glass windows and chimes and gateways 
and cages and base-ball fields, and all that sort of 
thing, which so many consider the essence of a mod- 
ern university, but for the men who were to help in 
this teaching. He appointed a committee of fifty 
graduates, with a very capable chairman, Mr. Cleve- 
land Dodge, of JSTew York, to prosecute this canvass 
over the whole country. In a brief time we received 
subscriptions sufficient to pay the entire expense of 
the experiment for five years, and a part, though less 
than the major part, of the endowment necessary to 
sustain the work in perpetuity. That canvass is still 
going on. I want to say that the very first effect of 
this, the most immediately and obviously beneficial 
effect, was on our own alumni. They responded 
quickly and splendidly to President Wilson's insist- 
ent assertion that the invisible things were greater 
than the visible. And so they have been willingly 
giving their money to help in this intimate education 
of our students. 



10 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

The next thing, after we were safe enough to go 
ahead, was to select the men who were to do this 
work. First of all we resolved that if the thing was 
to succeed at all, every member of the faculty already 
in the faculty who was qualified should take part in 
it, from the highest to the lowest officer of the staff 
of instruction, and that we should add to them men 
who would have the rank of assistant professors, but 
also the function of this close individual teaching. 
In doing so we spent a great deal of time, had a great 
deal of travel done and a great deal of conference 
held in the departments, and then searched the coun- 
try. We w^ere able to pay only a moderate salary for 
this service, valuable as it is — say $1,500 to $2,000. 
That naturally cut us off from men who were good 
scholars, but had incumbent on them the support of 
a family. I must say that seemed a pity. It seemed 
like encouraging celibacy again, and that is, of 
course, a terrible thing to do. But there we were. 
Again, it brought us face to face with this fact, that 
naturally the preceptors we should choose would be 
younger men as a rule, men, say, from twenty-eight to 
thirty-five years of age — that has been about the run 
of it — men, however, who had had thorough educa- 
tion, who had shown real scholarship, who had also 
shown that they were accessible, engaging, interesting 
men, who naturally loved students. I may say in the 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 11 

department of wliicli I am a member we considered 
seventy-four names, out of which ten were chosen. 
We are fully conscious that some of those who were 
not chosen were not chosen solely because they had 
been guilty of the atrocious crime of being married, 
but that was their fault and not ours. Still, leaving 
that out of account, we made a thorough search, and 
as a result last year — and if I may, let me add in the 
figures for this year — we have added over fifty men 
to the instructional force. 

JSTow, how did we go to work in apportioning their 
labor, and what sort of labor is it ? In the first place, 
let me say negatively a few things. Our preceptorial 
plan is not class instruction in very small divisions, 
excellent thing as that is. In the next place, it is not 
" coaching " or tutoring individual students or small 
groups of students to pass examinations. What is it ? 
Let us go back a minute and consider a college class. 
Take any class you like — freshmen, sophomores, 
juniors, or seniors. Assume any number you please. 
Suppose we take a freshman class, say 300 men. 
Let us assume they are being taught in twelve sec- 
tions or divisions of twenty-five students in the class- 
room, which is about our practice in the freshman 
year. What then? How does the preceptorial work 
touch them? 

I may say incidentally that it was clear immedi- 



12 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

atelj we could not do one thing — a thing, hj the way, 
that seems to me a great advantage in the Oxford 
plan. We could not find preceptors or tutors who 
could take any given student in all his studies. Of 
course you realize that this is done in Oxford. The 
students of the University of Oxford divide into two 
sets, the Passmen, those who are striving simply to 
get through, and the Classmen, those who are striving 
for honors. The Passman has a very limited range 
of subjects. In Oxford the student who will not 
work is given less freedom, an idea which does seem 
to mje well worthy of imitation here. Freedom is 
for the man who will work. The Classman is the 
man who will work. Very good. Your Passman 
enters Oxford, has his classics, his mathematics, his 
elements of natural philosophy and logic, and so on — 
practically a very limited range to begin with. Their 
system of education trains men who can supervise 
that restricted range of studies. So could our men, 
if that had been our mode of training. But it has 
not been. It would take some time to get it estab- 
lished, if it were necessary to establish it. 

The Classman in Oxford concentrates his work in 
some one important field, such as modern history, 
literoB humaniores, or natural science, and he has 
one person to guide him in that field. That is the 
way they provide for the Classmen. 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 13 

We solved our problem in the following way. Our 
freshmen and sophomores are to have, and do have, 
one hour a week with the preceptor in each leading 
subject. For example, freshmen who are candidates 
for the degree of B.A. have one hour a week precep- 
torially in Latin, one in Greek, one in mathematics, 
one in a modern language, one in English. Our 
freshmen candidates for the degree of Bachelor of 
Science will have one preceptorial hour a week in 
Latin, one in French, one in German, one in mathe- 
matics, one in physics, and one in English. Al- 
though it is not rigorously true — it is not quite true 
of freshmen — ^let us assume what is the fact now 
generally throughout the course of study that we 
have the fifteen-hour schedule, composed of five 
three-hour courses. We take one hour off the class- 
room instruction and give it to preceptorial work, 
so that in a three-hour course there will be two hours 
in the classroom and one hour with the preceptor. 

'Now let us see how the preceptorial hour works in 
a particular course and in the freshman year, though 
the unit there happens to be four hours in some sub- 
jects and two in others. How do we do it? It is 
mechanically practicable to take a class division of 
twenty-five men in any course and schedule them, say, 
on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — three hours. The 
first and second of these hours go to class instruction. 



14 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

the third hour to preceptorial work. But how ? In 
the following way: Take that division of twenty- 
five, break it into six little clumps of, say, four stu- 
dents each, and put six preceptors simultaneously at 
work during that third hour. That is an obvious, 
simple, mechanical device, but one which is to us of 
the greatest service. We can, of course, get any class 
division of twenty-five freshmen fairly homogeneous. 
We then divide the division into six groups, which 
will average four men apiece, and that is on the whole 
the prevailing unit in our preceptorial unit, groups 
of four men. We did not quite get to " blocks of 
-&veJ^ We should be pleased to hare groups of three, 
if we could have enough preceptors to attend to them, 
or even two, or one, but we have not. 

'Now it is evident that in any well-regulated time- 
table you can divide 300 students in any subject into 
twelve homogeneous divisions of twenty-five, provided 
you arrange things so that each leading subject di- 
vides independently of the others, and solely ac- 
cording to the merits of the men in that subject. 
Your first or highest division will thus contain the 
very finest students. Your second division will be, 
on the whole, the next finest set. And as you go 
on down your list of divisions you soon begin to 
get to high mediocrity, then dull mediocrity, deadly 
mediocrity, hopeless inferiority, and at last the 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 15 

abyss. At the top you have the homogeneity of 
knowledge as the common distinguishing mark ; at the 
bottom you have the heterogeneity of ignorance. At 
the top there is no trouble; because all know, know 
well and know together, and go like race-horses. We 
never have had trouble with any top division. At 
the bottom it is not so much a question of finding out 
the sum of what they know, but of finding out the 
character of the ignorance with which you have to 
deal in each case. If you can diagnose that, then 
you can save the lowest division. 

' How interesting the lowest division is ! Give me 
the head and tail of a class, not the middle. At the 
top are the fine spirited fellows, who cannot be held 
in, who need the rein. In the lowest division they 
need the spur. That lowest division, though, what- 
ever the subject is, contains those who are most evi- 
dently, painfully, woefully, in need of preceptorial 
instruction. Yet it contains some of the most in- 
teresting and lovable fellows that ever come to 
college. That lowest division contains the mature 
fellow, with dull mind and poor preparation, who is 
trying hard. It contains the young fellow who has 
gotten too quickly into college and is only half ready 
for the burden. It also contains the really able fel- 
low, who has had a good preparation, but does not 
mean to study. Those are the three kinds, I think 



16 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

there are no otlier kinds found in the lowest 
division. 

"Well, then what? Take any of those class di- 
visions — high or low. Assume that each division of 
twentj-five men is as homogeneous as it can be made. 
Then take each division and break it into six clumps, 
clusters, little tiny groups or sets of four students, 
and you are able, if you put six preceptors at work 
simultaneously — each with one of the clumps of four 
— to treat preceptorially the entire class division at 
the same hour. It is also possible to shift any in- 
dividual back and forth from one to another of these 
preceptorial groups, if occasion arises. What then? 
During the first two or three weeks of the term the 
members of the preceptorial groups which compose 
that lowest division — and there is the whole crucial 
test, of course — usually have to be taken tandem. 
They are all alike in being deficient, but unlike in 
the kind of ignorance they show. If you have 
an hour for four such men, give each one fifteen 
minutes the first day. Perhaps a week or two 
later you will be able to put two of them together, 
and the other two will still be taken separately. 
Perhaps you will find one of your colleagues has 
a man he would like to trade with you. Perhaps 
you can make the shift. Of course these six pre- 
ceptors can easily meet, talk over their little blocks 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 17 

of four, and in the course of a month the blocks of 
four may be so redistributed as to assume something 
of homogeneity. If, for example, it be even the man 
who cannot tell the difference in algebra between mul- 
tiplication and addition, as I fear some cannot, or if 
it be the person who cannot master the irregular verbs 
in Latin, as even the poet Heine admitted with tears 
he could not — no matter who it is, we have now gotten 
hold of the means of sorting him as nearly as possible 
into the exact place where he belongs. And, of course, 
as a month passes on, or two months pass on, more 
and more this group of men who are badly deficient, 
this little set of four, have been put together, perhaps 
shifted round from one group into another, till they 
have got into just the right place, and they are being 
treated by some one who is guide, philosopher, friend, 
critic, doctor, and politician all in one, and in a short 
time those fellows show the result. 

'Now, how do they show the result ? I said this was 
not a system class instruction by small divisions and 
that it was not a system of coaching for examination. 
What is it ? It is not in any sense coaching or tutor- 
ing on the course of study to which the preceptorial 
hour is related; but it is reenforcing the course of 
study by instruction, so. to speak, " on the side." Let 
us suppose a case of a student in Latin. He comes 
to reading his Livy. He has fallen into the Serbo- 



18 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

nian bog of trouble, namely, the subjunctive. I don't 
care how lamentable his difficulty, his preceptor takes 
him and makes the difficulty as plain as he can make 
it by talking straight from one man to the other. He 
sets him something to write. He sets him to " making 
his Latinos " as — ^who was it ? the great old school- 
master, Roger Ascham, said, " making his Latinos." 
And so in a short time he is taken out of the bog, his 
feet are set on a rock, and a song of rejoicing is in his 
mouth. In other words, in the course in Livy, the 
preceptorial hour is given to instruction of freshmen 
in the Latin language, according to the individual 
need of each one. The stuff that is used to teach him 
the language is the text of Livy, and his illustrations 
will be taken, his examples taken, the stuff out of 
which some English will be given for him to make 
into Latin, if you like, will be taken from Livy, and 
in that sense it is related directly to the course. And 
yet perhaps no two men, certainly no two blocks of 
students, have precisely the same area of instruction. 
The area of the preceptor's effort is the varying area 
of each student's special need. 

Let us recapitulate for a moment. We divide the 
300 into twelve homogeneous class divisions. We di- 
vide each class division into six preceptorial groups, 
according to the example I have given. ISTow, tliat is 
not the rule in all departments. In some departments 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 19 

we have not enough men to do that but something of 
that sort is our aim, and to a very large degree we are 
realizing that aim. 

How did we know the students were going to like 
it ? We did not. When the first academic procession 
of the faculty took place, with the host of new pre- 
ceptors added, the university turned out as though to 
see what sort of a new reenforcement we had secured 
for our intellectual foot-ball team. The curiosity 
with which our students watched the rejuvenated 
faculty was well worth looking at. 

To go on with our theme : 'No preceptor marks his 
students on their preceptorial work. Xo student is 
bound to be there, but if he is not there he will not 
be examined. What a combination of foreordination 
and election it is! If the preceptor cannot say his 
preceptee — pardon the word " preceptee '' — has tried 
to do satisfactory work during the term, the Depart- 
ment is not likely to examine him. What a lot of 
trouble that saves ! I have in mind, however, the first 
result, at the end of the first term when this plan was 
started last year. In one Department, which enrolled 
700 students, the total number of men who had to be 
excluded from examination, because they had not at- 
tended to the preceptorial work with sufiicient fidelity 
and intelligence to satisfy the Department, was only 
sixteen. We never had such a record in our historv. 



20 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

Why ? First, because the men found study interest- 
ing; second, because they liked the men who taught 
them, and, third, because they knew it was fair that 
the university should not waste its time on them if 
they did not respond. 

Many interesting things have grown out of this. 
Students are wonderfully complex beings — frank, ir- 
reverent, loyal, careless, optimistic, adventurous, 
lovable — ^boys turning into men. They begin to es- 
tablish their own traditions, what they call immemo- 
rial traditions, which are made very quickly in college 
life, a college generation being only four years, and 
the memory of a college generation being just four 
years long. What then? After a while the fellows 
get to thinking, " Well, what a really pleasant thing 
this is. We four are just a little club, with Professor 
So-and-so up in his room. If we care to smoke, we 
can do it." I^othing is said about that — ^nothing said 
one way or the other. " We sit around the table. We 
go over questions of interest. One is set to criticising 
the other, he to criticising all of us." What happens 
in the term? Perhaps somebody is dropped out of 
that group, perhaps dropped out of college. For 
whatever reason, he has disappeared. A new one en- 
ters. He is received with curious feelings. " What 
business has he to come into our group ? This belongs 
to us. This is our privilege." I would not destroy 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 21 

that feeling in their minds for anything, the feeling 
that they have something that is their own, that they 
have got something worth while. That is a good 
thing. " And who is this man to come in ? " is a 
very pardonable question for them to ask. How 
much better than if they were all scurrying to get 
out of the group as fast as possible. What wonderful 
fellows students are ! 

There are some tests we can mention as indicating 
the immediate effect of the preceptorial teaching in 
its first year in Princeton. One is the test of the use 
of books in the university library. If there is any- 
thing obvious to be said about the intellectual condi- 
tion of our American students to-day, it is that there 
is a sense in which they are illiterate. Splendid fel- 
lows — but are they reading men ? A man that does 
not like to read ought not to be called a student. How 
easy to read the newspapers, to read the athletic news, 
sometimes magazine articles, occasionally a book — a 
novel. But is it true that this generation is brought 
up to read good literature ? I am not a pessimist — 
far from it. Yet when I see the statistics collected 
in various colleges showing the abysmal ignorance 
that exists regarding the greatest book of our litera- 
ture, the English Bible, somehow I feel that we have 
been losing good literature in our homes, in our in- 
tercourse, in our colleges, in all our life. Kow, one of 



22 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

the charming and delightful sides of this preceptorial 
question is the strong emphasis we lay on reading, 
particularly in the upper years, and to some extent 
in the lower years. Perhaps we are giving them too 
much to read ; I fear we are. In our desire to make 
things work, we are crowding them a little. The uni- 
versity library proceeded to get plenty of sets of 
books, so that our students should not be compelled 
to spend their money too freely on the books that were 
set alongside of their courses. It kept account of the 
books that were used. The average use of the univer- 
sity library on the part of undergraduates the first 
term the preceptorial system went into effect in- 
creased heavily. I think we can say the books that 
were taken out in abundance were books of history, 
books of philosophy, books of literature, books of 
science — books that ought to be the natural reading of 
a man who calls himself a student. 

A second, and even a more subtle test, is the chang- 
ing character of conversation on the campus, at the so- 
called " eating clubs '' — what a dreadful name for a 
club. Things intellectual are now in good form — if 
spoken of without affectation. I could tell stories of 
students whom I know well that would come only too 
close home. Some of them had got in the way of 
thinking that it was not the thing, you know, to be 
studying too much, the thing was to enjoy your good 



THE TUTORIAL SYSTEM 23 

comradesliip, to study some, as mucli as might become 
a gentleman — ^no more — but not to throw yourself 
heart and soul into the best knowledge, not to make 
the acquaintance of the great masters of thought and 
fancy, not to open the mind, but to grow up, as one 
very wise English critic said, with " undeveloped 
mind,'' with boys' minds in men's bodies. That is 
changing. The talk is more and more of things in- 
tellectual. Even tangents and cosines sometimes fly 
around the campus. I don't mean for a moment to 
say that they won't talk a lot of other things — far 
from it. I do mean to say that there is some talk of 
these things daily at the table, in the walking by twos 
and threes, in animated informal discussion — just the 
thing we want. And out of that is coming — what? 
I fully believe there is coming the recovery of the lost 
art of conversation. 

Then a third thing, and I have done. Perhaps the 
most visibly notable thing is the effect on the uni- 
versity when evening comes. A great number of 
lights in the rooms, the comparative absence of stroll- 
ing, roaming crowds — the greater quietude — the gen- 
eral air. What shall I say ? Is it the atmosphere of 
study that is brooding and settling over the old halls 
in the evening ? I think it is. 

^ow, ladies and gentlemen, as far as a man can try 
who believes in a thing so much that he is in danger 



24 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

of speaking as an advocate rather than as a judge, I 
have tried to state fairly, if I could, the results of our 
first year. It has succeeded beyond what we ex- 
pected. It has not fully succeeded yet. Many diffi- 
culties arise from the first application that have still 
to he worked out. But we are so encouraged as to 
believe that we are recovering, at least for Princeton, 
the lost priceless benefit of the small college in the 
larger university. If so, we somehow feel that we 
are doing the rank and file of our students a greater 
service than by any other device we can think of to 
put in operation — any device that is in any way 
within our reach. 



II 



THE CHANGmG CONCEPTION OF "THE 
EACULTY" m AMEEICAN UNIVEE- 
SITIES 1 

I 

The original faculty, and still the necessarily central 
faculty of Arts and Sciences — the old " college fac- 
ulty " with all that growth outward and upward has 
added — is as much as this short paper can sketch, 
even in bare outline. Within our generation it has 
greatly changed. It is our purpose to show not so 
much the history of that change as the present situa- 
tion and some of its implications. 

The living root of the old faculty, as of every other 
part of the college, was a distinctively Christian im- 
pulse. It was the belief that in serving the cause of 
knowledge and truth by promoting liberal education 
men were serving the cause of Christ. Presidents, 
trustees, and professors were alike to give themselves 
in self-denial to their several tasks, mindful that this 
holy ideal was to guide and ennoble their every effort. 

^ A paper read before the Association of American Universities 
at the annual meeting in San Francisco, March 17, 1906. 

25 



26 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

And the old root flowered many a time in lives of 
strength and loveliness that remain as the fairest 
memories of the older period. Yet perhaps the ideal 
was too high ever to be realized generally by men as 
men were and still are. Certainly it is an infinite 
pity that a narrow particularism, an insistence on the 
local and clannish, and a consequent sectarian war- 
fare, somewhat mitigated by common sense and kind- 
liness, so often disfigured the old college that its 
power for good was lessened. Let us make these 
abatements freely, and yet gratefully remember that 
the old college faculty at least professed and tried to 
show that God is the end of all our knowing and that 
Christ is the Master of the Schools. 

With this ideal, then as now, the fiercely practical 
side of our American temper was found to be at vari- 
ance. The sense of achievement in visible things 
fought against faith in the invisible. A nation had 
been made and kept together. Society had been " in- 
stalled over a vast continent.'' We were free, as few 
peoples were, from such fearful dangers as poverty, 
famine, and invasion. Men could live free from fear. 
Careers were here for all who could make them. The 
elements of material good fortune were becoming ours 
beyond any measure known in history. And so the 
rival ideal of success, first in the outward and then 
in the sordid way, has been growing with our growth. 



THE FACULTY 27 

feeding itself all the while on the old eternal human 
selfishness. It has, of course, been true at all times, 
and notably so in times of trial like the Revolution 
and Civil War, that the nobler side has asserted itself 
and that men in their thinking and doing ^^ endured 
as seeing Him who is invisible." But the times of 
ease, plenty, and self-indulgence have not been 
friendly to the old college ideal, any more than they 
are friendly to the homely virtues of simplicity, clear 
sincerity, scrupulous respect for the rights of others, 
and modest independence. 

Moreover, as is almost too obvious to need men- 
tion, and yet so clamorously important as to need 
sure remembrance, our whole life, including its edu- 
cational preparation, has been getting more and more 
complex and tense. The individual counts for less 
and less. The aggregate, whether organized in cor- 
porate form or disorganized in wild, mob-like drifts 
of opinion and action, counts for more. To keep pace 
with our progress, to master the material of our lives 
so that the individual shall not be overwhelmed and 
crushed, some sort of organization becomes more and 
more imperative, if only that each man may have a 
fair chance to get his own good by cooperating and 
sharing in the common good. And out of this state 
of things has come an impatient message to our larger 
universities first, and then to the lesser ones. It is 



28 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

that efficiency must be our watchword (and catch- 
word), that education is a business, and that univer- 
sities are corporations like banks, railroads, factories, 
department stores, and insurance companies. I^otice 
is being served that if our university faculties do not 
conform to this notion, they must give way to facul- 
ties that will. This is the message. What have we 
to say about it ? 

II 

Let us make some admissions. First of all, there 
has been a great deal of folly talked about the free- 
dom of faculties and of individual professors. Would 
that the fact a man is a professor were sufficient proof 
that he is also a man of sense ! Sometimes it is not 
even proof that he is a scholar. Before we talk of 
larger freedom, we must be sure in a given case that 
the individual professor, and in each faculty at least 
the strong majority, is fit to be free — ^that is, sure to 
serve well the one supreme end for which professors 
and faculties legitimately exist. That end is intel- 
lectual and moral freedom, not for the professors 
alone, but for all others with whom they come in con- 
tact. It is a case where reciprocity is the only pro- 
tection. 

And so the actual assumption of responsibility for 
using this freedom well must come in to prove a man 



THE FACULTY 29 

fit to be free — to temper the judgment, to make us 
wise in counsel, considerate in action, tactful in 
winning men, swift to help and slow to harm the uni- 
versity we represent. If no professor proposed a reso- 
lution in faculty, I will not say unless it were sensi- 
ble, but unless he were man enough to see it through 
in execution, taking the blame for failure, and letting 
whoever would do so lay claim to the glory in case of 
success, we should then see a faculty undeniably fit 
for the widest freedom — an irresistible engine for the 
best work. So, too, if no professor coveted notoriety 
or lowered the academic tone of his lectures to attract 
attendance and applause, whether by exploiting some 
novelty or serving up the things of superficial charm 
to please idle hearers, how much more boldly could 
we demand more freedom for each as well as for all. 
Plain common-sense, open-eyed sympathy, tolerance, 
modesty, balance — these are some of the old, undra- 
matic virtues needed as guarantees that the free pro- 
fessor or the free faculty will be beneficently free. 
And yet let us not admit too much in this connection, 
for the fact that American faculties are not stronger 
in these virtues, and consequently deserving of more 
freedom, is not first of all the fault of our faculties, 
but of the presidents and trustees who choose them, 
or else the fault of insufficient resources. 

Secondly, we must admit that universities are cor- 



30 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

porations and that education is a business. Let us 
do so heartily. Is it not time we got away from hand- 
to-mouth living and rule-of-thumb reckoning, and 
recognized that business has its laws, and that experts 
must conduct it? Under American conditions the 
management of a large university requires some 
stable corporate base in the form of trustees or re- 
gents, and one executive head, a president. Unless 
we are to go wavering and drifting, the primacy of 
president and trustees must be maintained. We can- 
not in this imitate any old-world system. 

It is an immense gain that most of our universities 
are now so well managed on the business side. The 
wisdom of their investments has made more than one 
university treasurer's report a guide to prudent in- 
vestors outside. The very complexities and annoy- 
ances in the terms of gifts and endowments, the 
variety of accounts and securities, and the calcu- 
lation of probable revenues on less certain bases 
than many business enterprises possess have evoked 
surprising wisdom. The net result has been that our 
leading universities, so far as their hampering condi- 
tions permit, usually make every dollar do its work. 
Would any man in his senses suppose that American 
faculties could or would do as well ? 

Then the same corporation must use business sense 
in creating and maintaining a faculty. The best pro- 



THE FACULTY 31 

fessors procurable for the terms that can be offered, 
selection and promotion on recommendation of the 
president, and the unifying of educational policy by 
means of the same sole executive head, are necessities 
of our situation. In all this our universities have 
been learning the lessons of modern business effi- 
ciency. 

Ill 

!N"evertheless, if this is the sum of the proposition 
that university education is a business, our faculties 
are in a bad way, because it means the destruction 
of their intellectual and moral freedom by reason of 
the substitution of commercial for academic stand- 
ards. That this is the chief menace at the present 
time to the self-respect and usefulness of our profes- 
sors and faculties must be evident to all who know 
them. It is, of course, quite possible that we are in 
a transitional period, and that our faculties are mov- 
ing with an inevitable trend of events. That, how- 
ever, remains to be seen. But if it is so, we may be 
sure of one other thing, and that is a progressive im- 
pairing of academic standards and an ensuing degra- 
dation of our faculties to the condition of mere em- 
ployees. So far as this happens, universities cease 
living and begin dying. To avert such a result, or 
even the slightest menace of it, must we not then fight 



32 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

again the old fight for our academic birthright, and 
take part anew in the /Jidxr] dOdvaro? for a reasonable 
freedom, intellectual and moral, personal and col- 
lective. Can university professors who are men give 
any but one answer to such a question ? 

The trouble with the theorem " education is a busi- 
ness " is that it is only a preliminary half-truth — the 
half-truth which, however, fills the eye and mind of 
our business men. The truth in it is that business 
method is the means, but not the end, of education. 
The other and better half is that " the business of a 
university is education " — the half which makes the 
first half valuable. And while the trouble in profes- 
sors is that they are too often pitiably ignorant of 
the wholesome laws of business, the mate to this fact 
is that the business world is almost wholly ignorant 
of the laws of education. " Your plant is idle in the 
summer," said a British manufacturer to an Oxford 
professor. " You ought to put on a shift of men for 
that job." " The trouble with your plant," said one 
of our captains of industry lately, " is that your out- 
put will not stand business tests. Every boy you 
graduate ought to be your standard finished product. 
Otherwise, you should discard him early in the course 
as waste." " Suppose it happens to be your boy ? " 
he was asked. " And suppose this sample of waste 
turns out later to be a valuable by-product, or even 



THE FACULTY 33 

the real thing ? What then ? '' His answer was a 
prompt and creditable " I don't know." The region 
of his ignorance included the domain of college edu- 
cation. If, then, it be true that the very training 
which makes a man a professor dims his business fac- 
ulties, is it not fully as true that the training which 
absorbs the life of a business man blinds his edu- 
cational perceptions? How else, then, can this 
conscious or unconscious antagonism be mediated, 
except by recognizing that each has a lawful hemi- 
sphere ? The hemisphere of business is secure enough 
from invasion, but for the hemisphere of education 
we badly need a new Monroe Doctrine. 

Let us stick to our text, that the one business of a 
university is education. It will then be clear that the 
character and extent of business methods allowable in 
conducting a university must be governed by the kind 
of business to be conducted. It will also be clear that 
while the trustees or regents must strive to hold the 
university faithful to its trust and to secure what will 
make it efficient in its every part, the faculty alone is 
the body capable, or to be made capable, of the con- 
duct of all educational business according to educa- 
tional standards. The first dangerous invasion of 
commercialism is naturally made upon the corpora- 
tion, the body which connects the university with the 
outside practical world, the body which is, therefore, 



34 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

most accessible to attack. One and another trustee 
in the laudable desire for efficiency is apt to think first 
of the efficiency with which he is most familiar, the 
efficiency of the bank, the railroad, the business 
house. Under this impulse he unconsciously veers 
away from the academic point of view. Soon others 
turn away; enough to make a working majority, and, 
naturally, the first point of common convergence is in 
centralizing the deliberative, as well as active, func- 
tions of the university, including much of the proper 
business of the faculty, and even of the trustees or 
regents, in the person of one head officer — the presi- 
dent. 

I believe most firmly in high powers and, in grave 
emergencies, irresistible powers for every university 
president, in quick control of everything at short 
range. But that is one thing, a safe and wise thing, 
provided always it is done in the environment of open 
inspection, quick accountability, close participation 
of all competent members of boards and faculties, and 
the most scrupulous jealousy in maintaining for every 
one the utmost freedom of initiative, both in speech 
and action, that can be used with loyalty. Otherwise, 
so far as sharing in the common business goes, and so 
far as personal usefulness is concerned, we make 
boards and faculties personally and collectively less 
efficient for the very end they are created to promote. 



THE FACULTY 35 

and not the advantages, but the abuses, of the busi- 
ness world are ominously repeated in the form of 
" dummy " trustees and " dummy " professors. 



IV 

The profound change, then, now in progress in our 
American faculties is in the relation of the faculty 
to the president. The tendency, borrowed from the 
business world and increasing with the number of 
persons in the faculty, is toward individual and col- 
lective dependence on the president. And yet, so far 
as this does not curtail the self-respect of honorable 
professors by abridging their freedom to teach what 
they really believe, or to take part fully in the busi- 
ness of the faculty without prejudice to their standing 
or livelihood, even if they do not happen to agree in 
one or another important matter with the president, 
then, whatever is to be said against this increasing 
dependence as a danger to efficiency, it cannot be criti- 
cised as an attack on personal freedom. And it is 
here we think the test should be found as to what con- 
stitutes a professor's reasonable freedom. For, after 
all, the university must pull together, or it will pull 
apart. And, though the head be not the whole body 
or the major part of the body, the academic body, like 
the human, must have a head, unless it is to be a life- 



36 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

less trunk, and only one head, unless it is to be a mon- 
strosity. 

Is there anything, then, that needs to be suggested 
in order that the faculty, keeping to its own function 
and showing loyal deference to its head, may be kept 
from deterioration as the sole organ whose function 
it is actually to conduct university education effi- 
ciently ? Let us examine some of the suggestions that 
have been made : 

1. That the president, as the responsible head, 
should initiate all important measures of educational 
policy. This means that he initiates such measures, 
either alone, or by putting them in operation by the 
action of the corporation, and thus imposing them on 
the faculty, or by introducing them in faculty after 
shaping them in conference with a committee of the 
faculty, or by proposing them first in open faculty. 
There is something to be said for even this extreme 
view. It is that the university has one clear policy, 
and that the president has untrammelled opportunity, 
with practically exclusive responsibility, for doing 
whatever he thinks should be done. Let us take a dar- 
ing step and go so far as to say that there may be 
momentous occasions when the president must ^^ go 
it alone " or face an absolute impasse. Let us trust 
such occasions may not occur, nor even occasions 
when the corporation and president may come to feel 



THE FACULTY 37 

the J must join to impose unwelcome laws on reluctant 
faculties. Such situations merely argue a university 
to be in a very bad way. 

Introducing measures of policy after shaping them 
in a committee or department does of course recog- 
nize that there is value in expert counsel, and* intro- 
duction in open faculty recognizes and welcomes the 
help and advice of all. These are natural methods 
for any president who wishes his policies to be under- 
stood by his colleagues, and the latter method is the 
one which insures the most cordial assent and, in the 
long run, the greatest efficiency, though it must be 
confessed the penalty is sometimes the long-suffering 
endurance of professors who " darken counsel by 
words without knowledge." When the first reference 
of a measure is made from the faculty to its commit- 
tee for digestion and formulation, rather than by first 
reference of measures in predigested form from the 
president and a committee to the faculty, both the 
sense of freedom and of responsibility are quickened 
in the minds of the faculty as in no other way. Yet, 
whichever of these various modes the president may 
use, the general thesis that the president should ini- 
tiate all important measures of policy has more 
against it than for it. Every measure thus proposed 
becomes an administration measure and seems to 
challenge at the outset the loyalty and security of 



38 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

every one who may not be able to agree with it. In 
such circumstances, the free utterance of real opinion, 
unless it happens to be in substantial accord with the 
measure proposed, becomes almost impossible. Self- 
criticism is one of the necessary educational functions 
of a university, in order that all its measures may 
have the preliminary test as to whether or no they are 
well considered on all sides and will work well when 
put in operation. Whenever, for any reason, the at- 
mosphere of a faculty room is not friendly to this free 
utterance, the results are sure to be disheartening. 
Some professors will develop a cynical disregard of 
their duty to speak what they think, the weaker ones 
will be constrained to evasion, or even official hypoc- 
risy, and all will exhibit in varying degrees a loss of 
interest in the welfare of the university, except in so 
far as their own personal fortunes are affected. This 
turns professors into place-holders and place-hunters. 
The logical end is the destruction of responsibility, 
and consequently of interest, on the part of the fac- 
ulty in the important measures of policy on which the 
higher welfare of the university depends. E'eed it be 
added, by way of warning to those who believe in 
subjecting unive^'sities to the standards of the busi- 
ness world, that a faculty thus circumstanced is 
bound to become increasingly inefficient, and also un- 
attractive to the best professors ? 



THE FACULTY 39 

2. There is the suggestion of dual control by the 
president and faculty. This seems to me worse than 
the former; for, if the one seems to spell autocracy, 
the other spells weakness and discord. In case the 
president is a strong man, it means ceaseless friction 
between him and an oligarchy of professors. If he 
is a weak man, it means the presidency is reduced to 
a chairmanship by courtesy. In either event, it 
means structural weakness in the university and an 
unsteady attitude which keeps producing trouble in- 
side and distrust outside. 

3. Some may, perhaps, favor the idea of faculty 
ascendancy. For us, Oxford and Cambridge are its 
best examples. The professors there are virtually 
their own trustees, and they choose their own vice- 
chancellor. The plan has one very great advantage — 
personal freedom in a higher degree than is known 
in our faculties, or even in Germany. But let any 
one who would introduce it here remember the abys- 
mal differences that yawn between that situation and 
ours. Oxford and Cambridge are indeed more demo- 
cratic in the matter of professorial freedom than we 
are. But it is a democratic freedom that rests upon 
an aristocratic presupposition, a freedom of the pro- 
fessorial caste resting on a tradition sanctioned by 
centuries of privilege, checked and counter-checked by 
the balancing of intercollegiate rivalry, and issuing 



40 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

in restriction of all initiative to a small council, 
elected, to be sure, but so constituted as to be change- 
able only very slowly. Admirably in accord as it is 
with the stable and soberly balanced love of liberty, 
" broadening slowly down from precedent to prece- 
dent," that has made England great, it is not a fac- 
ulty model that can be produced here. But may it 
never perish there! 

4. There remains to be considered what can be 
done under our own conditions to invigorate and per- 
fect the faculty, not only to save it from the subtle 
poison of commercialism, but to make it do its educa- 
tional business efficiently, with full self-respect and 
in sure harmony with the president and corporation. 
I believe the one thing to be done is to revive in full 
power the democracy of the faculty, with its free 
president honored supremely and followed steadily as 
the one natural, as well as official leader of free pro- 
fessors. Only by following this path shall we be 
enabled to avoid the rank commercialism which be- 
lieves in its heart that a university is something like 
a store where the trustees are the proprietors, the 
president the manager, the professors the employees, 
and the students the capricious customers. 

And here we have to stop a moment to notice a 
futile remedy that appears in many forms. It is the 
remedy of committees and departments and councils 



THE FACULTY 41 

and senates. We are organized to death. It is the 
^^ worship of machinery " all over again. Of course, 
these things have constant and even indispensable 
uses. Of course, we must know where things are, or 
we shall never find them. For the routine business, 
the ever-recurring humdrum task, the mechanics and 
economics of our work, we shall always be needing 
these things^ — ^but always as our servants, never as our 
masters. If, behind the complex of our committees, 
we do not have the watchful criticism and active co- 
operation of the whole faculty — if the faculty does 
not really understand what its agents are doing, or 
what their measures mean — then the committees are 
virtually the faculty, and the faculty becomes little 
more than a listless and dwindling audience. This 
may possibly do well enough for routine business, but 
never for the understanding or cooperative execution 
of a great policy. For, unless a faculty actually con- 
trols all its parts and agencies, it cannot do its busi- 
ness in the best way, nor can it long maintain its just 
freedom. 

Let us face the situation. American faculties are 
weaker than they ought to be, so far as concerns their 
power to maintain educational standards and to per- 
form their own educational business. Their great 
growth has called for better organization, but organi- 
zation has progressed too much without regard to the 



42 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

fact that the object is not organization, but educa- 
tion. The greater centralization of functions in the 
president, with all its advantages, has been at the ex- 
pense of the free and proper exercise of the functions 
both of faculties and corporations. But this is not 
all. The decline of the old college ideal, which in- 
volved as one of its corollaries a definite liberal edu- 
cation by means of a few common studies of central 
importance, has been profoundly influencing the char- 
acter of our supply of professors. Less and less em- 
phasis has been placed on the general make-up of the 
man, and more and more on his specialized knowl- 
edge. The destructive theory that a professor is 
solely a teacher or investigator, and no longer a whole 
man, has shorn him of a priceless part of his aca- 
demic citizenship. This view has been followed by 
its sequel, that the professor is concerned only with 
his specialty. And so not only have we been acqui- 
escing in the view that his intensive special knowledge 
of one subject, or part of a subject, is properly ac- 
companied by an extensive general ignorance of other 
subjects, but we have been cheerfully accepting pro- 
fessors who are almost totally blind in regard to the 
affairs of university education. Professors have been 
going by such differing paths of preliminary training 
into their several by-paths of special study that they 
are not only getting far apart intellectually, but find 



THE FACULTY 43 

they have no one common ground to which they may 
ever return and meet in full fellowship. It is the 
very satire of our history that, along with centraliza- 
tion of the presidential functions and the constitution 
of elaborate machinery to keep things working to- 
gether, there has been a corresponding dispersion, 
from another cause, of the men who most need to 
stand constantly together in counselling for the best 
good of their universities. This must be changed, if 
our faculties are to consist more and more of men of 
all-round ability, men who are able to see and fit to 
solve larger questions with the moderation of wisdom. 
This means a renewal and better realization of the old 
college ideal which aimed to turn boys, not first of all 
into merchants or bankers or lawyers or professors as 
such, but into well-balanced, self-directing strong 
men. If this standard shall be restored to its pri- 
macy, we shall see in operation a force indispensable 
for the production of professors who are fit to be free. 
Meanwhile, recognizing the full rights of all parties 
involved, and recognizing further the need of begin- 
ning without delay, the all-important thing just now 
is to revive in vigor the democracy of the faculty. 
This means that it is the duty of every member to 
take part and make his voice heard in the business of 
the faculty, without arrogance and without fear, until 
such time as it becomes clear to his colleagues that he 



44 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

is not fit. Then he should subside. How shall we 
ever be educated as faculty members, unless this at- 
tempt is made? There will be some time wasted. 
Unwise suggestions will find utterance. They will 
meet with their natural corrective in the criticism of 
others. It will be well worth while. One priceless 
result will be that whatever the faculty does will be 
its own free act. With this will come the sobering 
influence of responsibility, to make all men who are 
not without sense use their liberty sensibly. Other 
good things will follow. A living tradition in things 
intellectual and moral will be established, a self- 
renewing tradition that will enable the university to 
exhibit to the world with some show of definiteness 
and continuity the ideals for which it stands. These 
are the only traditions that have a chance to outlast 
the men who make them. 

To this end, committees and executive officers, such 
as deans, heads of departments, and chairmen, should 
really be the choice of the faculty, even though the 
president names them. All committees and all offi- 
cers used by the faculty in its service should be ac- 
countable to the faculty, and their reports and pro- 
posals should be freely debated. 

But what, it may be asked, is to happen in case a 
faculty and its president do not agree ? A presiden- 
tial veto is no remedy here. So far as I can learn, it 



THE FACULTY 45 

has never been used with satisfaction to any one con- 
cerned. What then ? I see only one way. If, after 
debate, a faculty persists in its action, the right of the 
president, on recording his dissent, to take the whole 
matter for review to the corporation should be a mat- 
ter of course, and unless the faculty is overwhelm- 
ingly against the president, a wise corporation will 
usually sustain him. But nothing will have been 
smothered. The voice of the faculty will have been 
heard, and responsibility will be placed on the presi- 
dent and corporation, where it belongs. Contrari- 
wise, if the president accedes to some faculty action 
he does not approve, but does not thirds needs to be 
taken to the corporation, then again the responsibility 
is placed where it belongs. If it turns out that the 
action of the faculty was wise, the responsibility is 
rightly placed on the faculty, and the president wins 
approval for his considerateness. If it turns out that 
the action of the faculty was imwise, then again the 
responsibility is rightly placed on the faculty, and the 
president's opinion gains new weight. We do not 
need more machinery. We need this common under- 
standing. It will make steadily for justice, peace, 
freedom, and efficiency. 

jSTo university ever acquires true grandeur unless 
its faculty is made up of free men. Ko faculty dis- 
charges its duty happily and amply unless it is en- 



46 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

tirely free to propose and debate what it thinks right, 
and finally, no self-respecting faculty will do other 
than help its president, whether it happens to agree 
with him or not, so long as he devotes himself faith- 
fully to his arduous task. That task is to promote 
among his colleagues, his students, and all whom his 
imiversity can influence, the intellectual and moral 
freedom of men. And so I return to the opening 
thought: The old college ideal is the true one. We 
need it more than ever to save our universities — presi- 
dents, trustees, professors, students, and alumni, and 
all whom they can influence — ^f rom the degrading per- 
sonal and official servility that comes from commer- 
cializing our higher education. 



Ill 



TKUE AND FALSE STA:N^DAEDS OF 
GKADUATE WOEK^ 

We need not stop to prove at the outset of this dis- 
cussion that the liberal arts and sciences are and must 
be the central and regulative part of every true uni- 
versity. This body of studies alone, taken in its en- 
tirety, presents us with the nearest approach to a 
system of pure knowledge of universal value, ever 
improving, self-renewing, growing slowly clearer, 
more complete from age to age. It represents to us, 
as no other body of studies can, the sum of things 
best worth knowing by men whose object is to follow 
truth for its own sake, not as a means for obtaining a 
living, nor for social and political gain, but for the 
sake of ordering their lives in accordance with the 
highest ends. It was not without some glimpse of 
this truth that mediaeval letters referred to the uni- 
versities of Paris and Oxford as " the two eyes of 
Christendom," nor was it without like insight some 

* Read in Chicago, Friday, March 31, 1905, at the Tenth Annual 
Meeting of the North Central Association of Colleges aad Second- 
ary Schools. 

47 



48 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

of the oldest university documents began with the 
phrase : " We seek the pearl of knowledge, of great 
price, in the field of liberal studies." And what was 
thus true of universities at their birth has been true 
in every generation down to our own time and is evi- 
denced in many ways — as, for instance, in the fine 
declaration of Hofmann in his address as Kector of 
the University of Berlin, wherein he figured the lib- 
eral knowledge enshrined in the Philosophical Fac- 
ulty as " the Palladium of the Ideal." And so it is. 
Watch the wavering fortunes of university history. 
'No deterioration in the purity and strength of intel- 
lectual standards has taken place without affecting 
injuriously these studies. No great wave of com- 
mercial, technical or other utilitarian influence has 
swept on unchecked into university life without dis- 
aster to university ideals. And no great period of 
intellectual illumination and advance has come to any 
university in all the time of recorded history except 
through the self-sacrificing devotion of men' to the 
cause of knowledge as embodied in, or, at least, as 
closely related to the distinctively liberal arts and 
sciences. This has been our guiding light always. 

A university may have, and a complete univer- 
sity must have more than this central faculty of arts 
and sciences. The professional and technical schools 
which properly round out the circle, so far from be- 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 49 

ing despised as parts of a university, are tlie great 
appliances which connect the ideal centre of knowl- 
edge with the practical needs of the world. A law 
school, a medical school, an engineering school, all 
derive immense benefit by being placed in proper re- 
lation to the central faculty of arts and sciences, and 
give back many benefits in turn. But no aggregation 
of professional and technical schools makes a real 
university, because such an aggregation lacks its vital 
centre, its faculty of arts and sciences, which alone 
can maintain the universal standards of knowledge 
in all their exactness and rigor, and thus relate and 
steady the particular standards of the several profes- 
sional and technical schools. 

The liberal arts and sciences fall into two sections. 
The first or lower section is the undergraduate college 
course of study, the one thing in our higher education 
which is best worth preserving, for this alone fur- 
nishes the best basis, which is always desired, though 
not as yet generally taken, for subsequent university 
study, whether of liberal or professional character. 
So I need not do more here than state the fact that 
to preserve and develop the undergraduate college 
education in its purest form is to do an indispensable 
service to all forms of graduate study. 

Let us turn at once to the graduate work and con- 
fine our attention to this other section of the field of 



50 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

liberal studies. Professional and technical studies 
may in a sense be depended on to take care of them- 
selves. They will always flourish so long as men are 
seeking to be educated in order to make a profitable 
living. But graduate work in liberal studies cannot 
be maintained on this basis, because the end aimed at 
is different. For if the pursuit of wealth or station 
is the end aimed at by a man who thinks he is giving 
himself to the life of a scholar, he is not aiming at a 
scholarly end. Consequently, in order to maintain 
its own standards^ a true graduate school in the lib- 
eral arts and sciences must depend on something else 
to sustain it. The moment it becomes an employ- 
ment bureau or an agency for finding places, a sordid 
motive enters, and it is in danger of ceasing to be 
a school devoted to the cause of truth and knowledge. 
Unless, therefore, the life of the scholar is to appeal 
to men not primarily as a means of livelihood, but 
because they cannot help following the scholar's life, 
we have no sufficient basis for justifying the main- 
tenance of this all-important school. And if this 
school perishes or becomes degraded, you may be very 
sure that sooner or later every valuable function of 
the university will be injured. 

I suppose we can all accept heartily the statement 
that the chief business of a university is to maintain 
standards — to determine, inspect, and certify the in- 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 51 

tellectual and moral weights and measures. I do not 
doubt we can go farther and agree in asserting that 
this maintenance of intellectual and moral standards 
is acutely needed in our own nation at this time when 
its material interests are becoming so vast and com- 
plex. And this, more than all else, is the peculiar 
and pressing duty of every graduate school in liberal 
studies. Here the higher teachers of the nation are 
being trained. Here the influences which make for 
truth and reason are or at least ought to be most 
pure and uncontaminated. The service to be ren- 
dered is priceless, the need is urgent, and the fact 
that our graduate schools in liberal studies, properly 
planned and guided, are specially fitted to render this 
service is the fact which justifies their existence. 

It therefore becomes a matter of the first moment 
for us that the standards of graduate work should be 
maintained in as much purity as our means and intel- 
ligence permit. We know they will not be perfect at 
the best, but we also know that if we maintain them 
at a lower level than we ought, even according to our 
own imperfect conceptions of duty, there is nothing 
to keep even our existing standards from deteriorat- 
ing. The duty of self-criticism is therefore ever with 
us, not only if we are to improve, but if we are to 
keep what we have. I therefore ask you to look for 
a little while at three aspects of this question of true 



52 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

and false standards in graduate work — namely, onr 
standards of knowledge, our standards of expression, 
and our standards of judgment. 

1. The standards of knowledge in graduate work 
are especially threatened just now by the antagonism 
of an unenlightened specialization. This is not only 
the curse of the specialization which does not rest on 
a sound general education, but in a degree of all 
specialization which does not limit the subdivision of 
studies by some consideration of the intrinsic value 
of the thing studied. What knowledge is of most 
worth? is the fundamental question which tests 
every graduate study and every graduate student, as 
it does every one who professes to be a thinker in any 
field of knowledge at any stage of his life. It has 
now become a very fair question whether the subdi- 
vision of topics has not gone so far that not only the 
perception of relative values is clouded, but even the 
community of intellectual interests among our higher 
students is being destroyed. Certainly many of our 
scholars seem to be subjects of one or another petty 
principality rather than freemen in the great com- 
monwealth of knowledge. 

It is a matter of common remark that many of 
our rising students in science are only too ignorant 
of literature, many philosophers ignorant of science, 
and many literary men ignorant of both. But this is 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 53 

not the full extent of the trouble. Many men, 
whether in science or philosophy or literature or his- 
tory, are unacquainted with and utterly uninterested 
in either science or philosophy or literature or history 
as a whole. We may subdivide still more and find 
that one philosopher is a logician only, one scientific 
man a biologist only, and some other scholar a classi- 
cal philologist only. Would that we could stop here. 
But we must go on until we discover that there are 
many who are familiar only with some subdivision of 
a division of their logic or biology or philology. 
They may be known by two characteristics : The first 
is their intensive knowledge of a small portion of 
some subject, which is all very well, and the second 
is their extensive ignorance of everything outside that 
vsmall portion of their subject, which is not well at 
all. How vividly it brings out the point of Mon- 
taigne's satirical story. As he rode across the plain 
one morning, he encountered a company of gentlemen 
and said to them, " Good morning, Messieurs," and 
the leader of the company sharply replied, " We are 
not Messieurs. My friend here is a grammarian and 
I am a logician." Were these worthy scholars living 
to-day, perhaps they would not be able to profess even 
so much. The one would likely be a student of some 
little part of syntax and the other the exploiter of a 
mechanical device for grinding out some special re- 



54 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

suits of the use of the syllogism. This again may be 
well enough, provided the specialist is not making it 
the end of his intellectual life, provided he constantly 
realizes that the only valuable specialization lies in 
studying the general in the particular, and that the 
relating of an accurately determined particular to the 
general is the only thing which gives the results of 
specialized study their place and shows their size in 
the body of valuable knowledge. We are not object- 
ing to specialization — far from it — but solely to the 
study of the unimportant. And this may take many 
forms. It may take the form of investigating some- 
thing which, when ascertained, is found to be a trifle. 
Or it may take the form of solemnly proving the ob- 
vious by an elaborate array of statistics, as when we 
are shown conclusively by tables of percentages, 
which have been tested and retested, that a given 
number of childretc born and bred in the city, com- 
pared with the same number born and bred in the 
country, show less knowledge of the different kinds 
of plants, grains, birds, and beasts than do their rural 
compeers. Of the same nature is the recent proof 
showing minutely and beyond the shadow of a 
doubt that in the domain of " child psychology " 
there was a marked distinction between the prefer- 
ences of young boys and girls for animal pets, more 
girls than boys preferring birds, and that unkindness 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 55 

or cruelty to an animal was from thirty to fifty per 
cent more shocking to a girl than to a boy. Does 
one need to pursue higher university studies in order 
to know this ? 

A force which is always operating to increase the 
perplexities of the situation is the mania for publi- 
cation. It is assumed that production of original 
results, published so all may have a chance to read 
and test them, is a necessary mark of the higher 
scholarship. Pressure is therefore constantly felt by 
the aspiring young candidate to justify himself in the 
eyes of other scholars in this way. Our embryo 
Doctors of Philosophy must write and print a disser- 
tation. This again is very well, if the man who is 
writing the dissertation has a sensible mind and is 
writing about something that needs to be made 
known. But what has come to pass ? Another del- 
uge ! The number of reviews, scattered articles and 
contributions of every sort in any one great subject, 
such as biology, or history, or chemistry, or classics, 
is so great that it is doubtful whether any human 
being can read in ten years the output in any one of 
these subjects for one year. The vast mass of publi- 
cations is piling up unsifted, unorganized, and there- 
fore unavailable to a large extent for future use. It 
reminds us a little of what Carlyle said about the 
voluminous archives of the French Eevolution : " The 



56 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

French Eevolution consists of some tons of manu- 
script slowly rotting in the European libraries." 

The menace to our standards of knowledge offered 
by intemperate specialization is thus increased by a 
false notion as to what scholarly productivity is. It 
consists not only in the advancement of knowledge, 
but in the diffusion of knowledge, and, above all, it 
consists primarily in the advancement and diffusion 
of the more valuable knowledge. And, in passing, let 
us ask how any one can fail to see that the question 
whether a certain body of knowledge is new or old 
has in itself nothing to do with the question of rela- 
tive values. Furthermore, in the forming of a great 
scholar by the close personal touch of his master there 
is a far nobler form of productivity than in the writ- 
ing of even an important dissertation. As a rule, 
the best " collected works " a scholar can leave is a 
group of great students. In the light of such con- 
siderations, is it not clear that the entirety of our 
standards of knowledge is being menaced ? The pure 
white light is being broken into the various beams 
that compose it, and many there are who see not even 
so much as one whole color, but only some one hue of 
that color in the great spectrum. The clear organi- 
zation and evaluation of the knowledge we now have 
seems at the present time of more importance than 
all the stray advances hither and thither. 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 57 

Our standards of knowledge therefore need to be 
centred in the general body of ascertained truth. We 
must take our position, in the words of Francis 
Bacon, that " philosophy and universality are not 
idle studies," and we must carry this so far as to be- 
lieve that only in the light of the universal shall we 
understand the worth and bearing of the particular. 
And as the only available practical help toward 
securing this attitude of mind in our graduate stu- 
dents, we must insist on a clear and pure preliminary 
training in liberal college studies, followed by such a 
training in their graduate work as constantly keeps 
them in touch with the community of intellectual in- 
terests outside their special field of study. And to 
secure this in turn, we should aim to secure as gradu- 
ate students only men of strong, all-round ability, 
open vision and wide sympathies. In short we must, 
first of all, secure the right kind of man as a gradu- 
ate student. Having done this, we may rest assured 
that all other desirable results may be made to follow. 

2. When the harmonious standards of general 
knowledge are lost sight of, particular standards 
suited to one or another specialty are apt to take their 
place. Partly as a result of this, there comes a cor- 
responding change in the standards of expression. 
When ]the broad view is lost, simplicity and universal- 
ity of statement, and a consequent attractiveness and 



58 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

beauty of presentation, are apt to suffer. It is not 
enough that a book or dissertation in the field of schol- 
arship be accurate and painstaking, if it is to survive 
in the recollection of men. As v^e review in thought 
the books and papers vrhich have made a mark on the 
intellectual life of any period, it is easy to see that 
many able contributions to knowledge have passed 
into oblivion because they were not engaging and 
readable, whereas one of the distinctive marks of the 
finest class of such compositions is their convincing 
charm of style. These are the classics of science and 
philosophy, as well as of literature. A scientific 
writer who has the artist's sense has thus an advan- 
tage over his equally able rival, and sometimes over 
his abler rival, who lacks this sense. "Now one of the 
most evident faults of the mass of specialized publi- 
cations which now occupy the main place in our lit- 
erature of scholarship is a sort of solemn pedantry. 
This springs from the entire subordination of the 
writer to his restricted theme, and to the particular 
technique of language which belongs to his specialty. 
He does not dominate his subject, but is mastered by 
it. He therefore writes too much in a dialect, and not 
in a literary way. He becomes dry and lifeless. Of 
course every subject and every subdivision of a sub- 
ject has its own furniture of ideas and must make 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 59 

use of the technical words which alone set forth these 
ideas accurately. But this has been fearfully over- 
done. If it sufficed a Newton to define the elusive 
atom — whether rightly or wrongly is of no import- 
ance here — as " the least part of matter/' ought we 
not to take courage from his example and insist that 
technical terms, except when necessary, and highly 
formal language, and in fact all forms of swollen dic- 
tion, be excluded from the scholar's writing. The 
difficulty of the ideas is sufficient without enveloping 
them in a fog of words. Let us somehow manage to 
keep the common store of pure English as the one 
treasury to which we resort for everything common 
English words can express. In this way alone shall 
we be able to preserve a general reading interest 
which will steadily connect the publications in one 
department of knowledge with the publications in 
another. Descartes has said that clearness is a test 
of truth. Without going so far as to reverse this and 
to assert that obscurity of statement is evidence of 
error, we may at least use the maxim as a warning to 
all men who are prone to write in a formidable tech- 
nical dialect. 

One other thing may be said in this connection: 
Pretentiousness of any sort is unscholarly, whether 
it be in the form of conceit as to the value of one's 



60 AJVIERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

own thoughts or in the form of grave pedantry in 
proclaiming them to others. And, lastly, on this 
point it may be asserted that the man who is a slave 
to a technical terminology is in constant danger of 
getting away from the concrete truth of what he is 
studying into a region of artificial construction, where 
he is so much occupied with the scaffolding and outer 
appliances that he mistakes work on these for work 
on the real building. 

3. Back of all standards of knowledge and expres- 
sion in the scholar's life lie his standards of judg- 
ment. On these, more than on anything else, depend 
the genuineness and permanence of what he does. 
We may leave geniuses aside in this discussion, be- 
cause there is no use or need of legislation for them, 
and after all they are very few in number, supreme 
as their distinction is. And yet, even in the case of 
geniuses, we shall find more instances of sound com- 
mon-sense than might be expected. But what of the 
mass of scholars ? What is to be the ultimate guar- 
antee to mankind generally that their work is intrin- 
sically valuable, whether it be brilliant or plain, ex- 
tensive or limited, commanding or humble ? Faraday 
somewhere writes that the education of the judgment 
is the chief benefit of a scientific training, and Hux- 
ley has told us that scientific ability in its last analy- 
sis is nothing less and nothing else than " trained 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 61 

How this throws us back on the 
personality of the man whom we are to encourage to 
be a graduate student! It thus becomes primarily 
the question not of what he can know, how he can 
express it, or how much he can do, but what kind of 
a man he is. The reasonings and conclusions of a 
vain man will be tinged with vanity. The judgments 
of a man " deep versed in books, but shallow in him- 
self," will not permanently appeal to the respect of 
his fellow men. The capricious or adventurous or 
self-advertising scholar is, so far forth, not a true 
scholar. The fate of our higher studies, in their 
effect on the men we influence, depends first of all 
on what kind of men we are. The kind of scholar 
any man is to become, so far as the abiding value of 
his influence goes, is determined in the last resort 
not so much by what he knows or says, as by what 
he believes and loves. He must have the lover's in- 
stinct, almost the art of divination. Like the miner, 
he must have the eye that knows the ores of gold 
from fooFs gold. The student who naturally longs 
to know the things of most worth, and searches for 
them in all simplicity and sincerity, and purposes to 
turn all to the best account by making his acquire- 
ments accessible and serviceable to his fellow men, is 
the only kind of man who ought to be encouraged to 
enter our graduate schools. And this kind of man 



62 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

is most naturally bred in the comradeship of our col- 
lege life and in the atmosphere of liberal studies. 
What a mistake to fail in any way to make our gradu- 
ate schools supremely attractive to just this sort of 
man. Given the personal qualities indicated and a 
suitable college training, and on top of this a life in 
graduate studies environed by the friendships that 
arise from the constant interchange of ideas between 
men studying in different departments of knowledge, 
how can the young scholar, so circumstanced, fail to 
develop that " trained common-sense," that well- 
poised judgment which must enlighten all his think- 
ing and all his doing if he is to be the scholar we are 
describing. 

It has often been debated whether the theoretical 
or the practical mind is the higher type. If the 
terms are used in their proper sense, it seems to me 
there can be only one answer : The practical mind is 
the better, because sound judgment which is essen- 
tial to all sane scholarship, is an eminently practical 
thing. It is this that transforms knowledge into wis- 
dom. The brilliant theoretical scholar, without this 
ancliorage, is structurally weak. But let us not mis- 
understand what this practical mind is. It is not cut 
off from theory. In fact the highest practical schol- 
ars are those most deeply grounded in theoretical 
knowledge. But they differ from the merely theoreti- 



STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK 63 

cal scholars in being able to use that knowledge 
steadily in applying it to the best advantage, and 
consequently the man who is a practical scholar in 
this sense is the only one who unites the best traits 
of the theoretical and practical mind. So when we 
see men of flighty judgment, erratic purposes, and 
unsteady vision, let us keep them out of our graduate 
schools as surely as we keep out the drone or ought 
to keep out the dullard. 

At this time, more than ever before, business and 
professional life, with their attractive careers and 
dazzling rewards, are taking most of the able men of 
the country. The attractions of the scholar's life are 
not relatively as great as they were a generation ago, 
nor is the honor paid to the scholar so great in our 
land as in the older civilizations of Great Britain, 
Prance, and Germany. And yet on the little band of 
scholars in the liberal arts and sciences depends, more 
than ever before, the tone of our nation in things in- 
tellectual and moral. We have already too many 
second-rate and third-rate and fourth-rate men among 
our scholars. We shall never be short of these. But 
on our graduate schools in the liberal studies rests 
the supreme privilege and duty of standing more 
resolutely than ever for the best standards of knowl- 
edge, expression, and judgment, so that the small 
company of picked men who are best fitted b;^ reason 



64 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

of their high manhood to become our best scholars 
will naturally resort to our graduate schools and lift 
them, and with them the higher American scholar- 
ship, to a level never attained before. And may we 
live to see that day! 



IV 



THE PKESEE^T PEEIL TO LIBEKAL 
EDUCATION 1 

Liberal education, like political liberty, is always 
worth preserving and always in peril. In such 
causes, if anywhere, men need to be ever resolute as 
well as intelligent, for only thus does it become pos- 
sible, even when distressed, to face grave crises with- 
out becoming for an instant pessimistic, inasmuch 
as the priceless value of what we are seeking to de- 
fend assures us that our efforts are well worth 
making and that no effort is too great in maintaining 
so good a cause. 

We have such a cause to-day, the cause of liberal 
education. I need not argue in this presence that as 
it prevails our American life is lifted, and that as it 
fails our American life is degraded. It is to-day, as 
ever, in peril, but in unusual peril as embodied in its 
noblest representative, the American college. 

Let us picture the situation in its worst possible 

outcome. Suppose the chances are that the college is 

^ Read before the National Educational Association at its 
Boston meeting, general session, Monday evening, July 6, 1903. 

65 



66 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

to fail, to be crushed out between the upper and 
nether millstones of professional and secondary 
schools by reason of the violent demand for something 
more "practical.'' What then? If it must go, it 
must go, of course. But ought it to go ? And if not, 
ought it to go without a struggle ? Those who know 
most about colleges think not, while those who know 
least about them — and they form a huge majority — 
are often indifferent and sometimes hostile. Scarcely 
one in a hundred of our young men of college age has 
gone to college. This little band of alumni, at least, 
is with the college, and so is the rest of the better in- 
telligence of the land. But educated intelligence 
does not always prevail over ignorance, even in de- 
ciding matters of education. One can hardly fail, 
when painting the danger at its blackest, to recall 
the great words of Stein, when appealing to his fellow 
Prussians in the ^Napoleonic wars : " We must look 
the possibility of failure firmly in the face, and con- 
sider well . . . that this contest is begun less in re- 
gard to the probability of success than to the certainty 
that without it destruction is not to be avoided." 

It is by no means as black as that, nor does it seem 
likely to become so. But even if the peril were far 
greater than it is, there would be no good reason why 
we should not continue the struggle. There is good 
reason to believe the forces with us are strong enough, 



THE PRESENT PERIL 67 

not only to save, but to strengthen the American col- 
lege, and that when once its real value is brought 
home anew to the minds and consciences of men, it 
will assert its rights with ample power. 

Let us think for a moment of what the American 
college is. It has been evolved out of our own needs 
and has proved its extraordinary usefulness by a long 
record. It has been democratic in its freedom of ac- 
cess and in the prevailing tone of its life. It has fur- 
nished our society and State with a small army of 
well-trained men. In it supremely are centred our 
best hopes for liberal education, both as focused in the 
college itself and as radiating outward on the secon- 
dary schools below and the professional schools above. 
It is the best available safeguard against the mechani- 
cal cramping of an unliberalized technical education. 
It is our one available centre of organization for true 
universities. It has produced a class of men un- 
equalled in beneficent influence by any other class of 
equal numbers in our history. 

In the rush of American life it has stood as the 
quiet and convincing teacher of higher things. It has 
been preparing young men for a better career in the 
world by withdrawing them awhile from the world 
to cultivate their minds and hearts by contact with 
things intellectual and spiritual in a society devoted 
to those invisible things on which the abiding great- 



68 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

ness of our life depends. By reason of this training 
most college men have become better than they would 
have been, and better in important respects than they 
could have been, had they not gone to college. Their 
vision has been cleared and widened, and their aims 
have been elevated. Not least of all, they have been 
taught incessantly the lesson, so deeply needed to 
steady them in our fiercely practical surroundings, 
that the making of a good living is not so important as 
the making of a good life. The college has proved 
its right to live. To preserve, maintain, and energize 
it to its highest capacity for good, to prune its ex- 
cesses, strengthen its weak places and supply its needs 
is therefore the bounden duty of those who care for 
the best interests of our nation. 

The perils which beset it come from various 
sources — first, from the common defects of our 
American civilization; second, from the weaker ten- 
dencies in young men ; and third, from the confusion 
of counsels inside the college itself. The first two we 
must be prepared to encounter always, but the last 
one ought to be avoidable. 

This is no place to draw up a catalogue of our com- 
mon defects as a people. Our virtues we know well. 
They are self-reliance, quick ingenuity, adventurous- 
ness, and a buoyant optimism. Our national faults 
are not so pleasant to think of — as, for example, the 



THE PRESENT PERIL 69 

faults of boastful vulgarity and reckless excitability. 
Yet there are some that must be mentioned as being 
specially perilous to our college education. The chief 
one, I think, is commercialism, the feverish pursuit 
of what " pays " as the one end of life. Are we not 
subjected to-day, as never before, to demands for 
teaching the things of commerce as part of the col- 
lege course? And are not the mechanical arts and 
crafts, admirable indeed in their true uses, trying to 
mix in with the other things as though they were of 
the same family of studies, and saying they must 
have room in the same house even if other members 
of the family are pushed out. Are not technical 
studies being called liberal, and is not even the tech- 
nique of the professions sometimes labelled liberal 
also, on the plea that all knowledge is liberalizing? 
So it is, but in what differing degrees and senses! 
The instinct for the useful is being perverted and ex- 
alted above the love of knowledge as a chief end. 
And why ? Because what is wanted is something im- 
mediately, obviously, almost mercenarily useful. Is 
it not time we read again the books of philosophy to 
learn again that the true utility is the long utility 
which serves to make a whole life useful, and that it 
is the end for which men live that makes them useful 
or useless ? Do we not feel that we are here coming 
close to the sanctions of religion and need to answer 



70 MIERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

that deep question, What shall it profit a man? once 
more. 

Another peril is a companion and natural follower 
of commercialism, namely, illiteracy. Not in the 
meaning of that word in the census tables, but in the 
meaning of ignorance of good literature. " Ko man 
can serve books and mammon,'* said Richard de Bury 
long ago. Is it not a fact that the majority of college 
students to-day are not familiar with the common- 
places of literary information and the standard books 
of history, poetry, and so on. Do they know that 
greatest book of our tongue, the English Bible, as 
their fathers did ? What have so many of them been 
reading? The newspapers, of course, and fiction — 
not always the better fiction. As between books and 
the short stories in magazines, how few read the 
former! I am not now speaking of the hard books 
of philosophy and science, or generally of the books 
that involve severe thought, but of the readable, de- 
lightful books, the pleasant classics of English. 
What a confession of the state of things it is that col- 
leges have to make the reading of a few books of 
English literature a set task as an entrance require- 
ment, and then ask formal questions on what ought 
to be the free and eager reading of every boy at home. 
How far it is true that the advocacy of teaching 
science may have operated, not to beget a taste for 



THE PRESENT PERIL 71 

science, but merely a neglect of literature, is perhaps 
idle to ask. It is at least true that these neglecters of 
literature are not usually giving laborious hours to 
reading scientific works. Perhaps some day our 
schools generally will get " Eeaders " that have lit- 
erature in them, and that will help matters a little. 
Eut the so-called students who do not care to read, or 
do not know how to read as all students should, are 
with us in abundance as an ever-present peril. The 
quiet book by the quiet lamp is a good charmer. 
Here the true student forms his friendships with the 
masters of thought and fancy ; here they speak to him 
not under the constraints of the classroom; here he 
may relax without weakness, adventure without limit, 
soar without fear, and hope without end. It is the old 
story. Books are, as Huxley put it, " his main help- 
ers," and the free reading outside the set tasks is, 
perhaps next to music, his most ennobling pleasure. 
The loss of this is to-day the thing that does so much 
to deprive our college life and conversation of the fine 
flavor of that much misunderstood thing, Culture. 

Another peril comes from the students themselves. 
It is a disposition to do the pleasant rather than the 
hard thing, even when the hard thing happens to be 
the best thing. This is most common among those 
whose main interest in college life is social. It is also 
fostered by the general absorption in athletics, though 



72 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

it is not so much the athletes who are affected — for 
they are at least used to a vigorous discipline in things 
physical — as it is the mass of onlookers who attend 
the games and waste so much time discussing them. 
This social and athletic environment, with all its un- 
deniable and, I believe, indispensable good, is just 
now doing much harm to the intellectual life of stu- 
dents. Because it is unduly exaggerated it is operat- 
ing powerfully to disperse the student's energies in 
a miscellany of things outside his studies. Things 
which should come second, as the relaxation of those 
whose first business is study, often come first, and 
studies must get what they can of what is left. How 
natural it is that such students should crowd into the 
easier courses. They have little interest left for any- 
thing intellectual. So far as this occurs, liberal edu- 
cation dies and college students come to their man- 
hood with men's bodies and boys' minds. What is 
being lost is the development of virile intellectual 
power, a thing which simply cannot grow without 
exercise. 

This is a matter which goes far below the question 
of one or another plan of studies, though it is greatly 
affected by the relative wisdom or unwisdom of what 
the student is offered. If he finds a course which im- 
pels him and his comrades to regular effort day by 
day, and also gives him the immense help that comes 



THE PRESENT PERIL 73 

to all young men of ordinary abilities from moving 
together with their fellows in the same direction, his 
progress in studies is part of the orderly advance of 
a march, with little chance for straggling or loitering. 
If he is confused by failure to discover that there is 
a rational order of studies or that his college believes 
there is at least some preferable order for the mass 
of students, he thus loses much or all of a kind of 
help he ought to have. If the educated experience of 
his college cannot tell him, at least approximately, 
what things he ought to take and some definite things 
which all college students ought to take, how is he 
to find out with any strong probability that he is going 
straight on the right road ? Those who are so ready 
to move an indefinite distance along any of the diverg- 
ing directions of elective freedom may well pause to 
ask whether the keen words of Descartes on progress 
in knowledge are not worth heeding in this connec- 
tion : " It is better to go a short distance on the right 
road than a long distance on the wrong one." 

The love of freedom from control and of pleasure 
in our labor are splendid things. They are at once 
the charm and peril of student effort. The true free- 
dom of the human spirit is the true end of the college 
course. This is not injured, however, by creating 
places where students may go, if they will, and where 
they must take some subjects of study which experi- 



74 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

ence shows to be eminently fitted in their combination 
to serve this very end. We are asking simply for 
some of the central truths of history, literature, 
science, and philosophy, what Locke called the " teem- 
ing truths, rich in store, with which they furnish the 
mind, and like the lights of heaven are not only 
beautiful and entertaining in themselves, but give 
light and evidence to other things that without them 
could not be seen or known." ^ And as for the element 
of pleasure, why should we not desire it ? How ex- 
quisitely did Aristotle say, " Pleasure perfects labor, 
even as beauty crowns youth.'' ^ 'Not the idle pleasure, 
however, but the achieved pleasure, the deep pleasure 
that comes from noble mastery, from winning on the 
hard-fought field of athletics of the mind, and, above 
all, from winning in the fight against intellectual 
sloth and easy-going indulgence — this is the crown 
of our best young college manhood. 

A few words must suffice to set forth another peril 
which especially besets us at this time. It is the peril 
of confusion in college counsels. It has been inevi- 
table because of the extreme diversity of educational 
conditions in our land and because of conflicting 
theories of college training. 

The pole of law and the pole of freedom are the 

' Of the " Conduct of the Human Understanding," 43. 
' "Ethics," X, 4, 8. 



THE PRESENT PERIL 75 

two contrasted standpoints, with many a halting- 
place between. It is, of course, clear that any attempt 
to cast all our colleges in one mould is foredoomed 
to failure. We must seek some other remedy. But 
if the present confusion cannot be cured, the colleges 
will be seriously and permanently weakened. Here 
at least we must do something, and do it soon. The 
colleges must at all events do one thing, and that is 
to make it as clear as possible what it is they are 
severally seeking to accomplish. Certain very prac- 
tical questions need to be answered. They are ques- 
tions of the substance and aim of liberal education. 

One of the questions is. Should a college exact a 
substantial amount of prescribed studies for its de- 
gree? If so, there is room to organize our bache- 
lor's degrees according to the types now slowly, 
though imperfectly, evolving in our time. If not, 
the free elective plan with one bachelor's degree is the 
true alternative. There are many halting-places be- 
tween, but none of them is a resting-place. Here, 
then, is a basis of clear division without confusion, 
and one that plain folk can understand. The nature 
of the answer given will depend on whether or no a 
given college believes that there are substantial stud- 
ies above the stage of our preparatory schooling 
which are essential to the best liberal education. In- 
termediate or minimizing positions on this question 



76 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

will result in corresponding vagueness and uncer- 
tainty in organization, and will tend to perpetuate the 
confusion. It is worth sacrificing something, even in 
a transitional stage, for the sake of the assured gain 
that accrues to a well-defined plan. If it turns out to 
be a wrong plan, its defects become visible sooner and 
may be more promptly amended. 

Let us ask a second question. Is there or is there 
not a proper field of college studies, exclusive of the 
fields of secondary, technical, and professional learn- 
ing? If so, such studies alone should constitute the 
college course. If not, studies from the other fields 
may be brought in. It will not do to say no sharp 
line can be drawn between fields of education for the 
reason that the domain of knowledge is one, and all 
knowledge is liberalizing. Follow this out consist- 
ently, and important distinctions, needed to effect a 
working scheme of division for the parts of education, 
are obscured. We may distinguish between great 
regions, even though we are unable to settle all 
boundary disputes. There are enough college studies 
of undisputedly and eminently liberal character to 
fill the college course to repletion. Let those who be- 
lieve this organize accordingly, and let those who 
believe that any respectable study possible to students 
of college age may be put in the college course, put 
such studies in. The two kinds of colleges will then 
be distinctlv discernible. 



THE PRESENT PERIL 77 

If the college is to prevail, the confusion, though 
not necessarily a division of counsels, must cease. 
The two opposing tendencies indicate the two avail- 
able lines for at least making the division clear to the 
country at large. Intermediate positions are unstable 
and transitional. They make confusion. What 
parents, teachers, and students need to know as defi- 
nitely as possible is precisely what it is a given col- 
lege stands for. Uncertainty here breeds loss of con- 
fidence in liberal education. It is to be hoped that 
most of the colleges will be able to stand together. If 
they do, I hope and believe they will stand for the 
conviction that there are college studies essential for 
aU who take the college course, that it is the comple- 
tion of these which opens to the student the best all- 
round view of the knowledge most serviceable for his 
whole after-life, and that the ideas of discipline and 
duty, in studies as well as in conduct, underlie any 
real development of the one true freedom of the 
human spirit. 



THE LENGTH OF THE COLLEGE 
COUESE 1 

The American college is the vital centre of our sys- 
tem of higher education. With all its imperfections, 
it serves, as probably no other institution can serve, 
to uphold the standards of the secondary schools and 
to lift from below the level of professional schools. It 
occupies an intermediate field of its own, not per- 
fectly defined, but as clearly defined as the fields of 
our secondary or professional education. It should 
be allowed and encouraged, as they are, to organize 
itself completely and efficiently according to the laws 
of its own life, without curtailment or encroachment. 
Otherwise we shall be in the absurd and uncivilized 
position of refusing to try for the best college educa- 
tion, and shall be sacrificing to commercial and utili- 
tarian demands the one educational agency most 
needed to purify and elevate the too materialistic tone 
of our American life. 

^ Read before the National Educational Association (Depart- 
ment of Higher Education) at Boston, July 7, 1903. 

78 



LENGTH OF COLLEGE COURSE 79 

By tradition the length of the college course is four 
years. This is almost universal. There seems to be 
no good reason a 'priori why it should have been four, 
rather than five or three, or even two. But the prac- 
tical unanimity of the tradition indicates that thus 
far, at least, the period of four years has been found 
to be well suited to our needs. Analyze this as we 
may, it is a definite result of long and wide experi- 
ence and one which should not be discarded without 
the fullest consideration. 

It is argued, however, that conditions are changing 
and that a shorter time must be allotted if we would 
save the American college. This argument rests 
mainly on the increasing age of the student at en- 
trance to college and the lengthening courses of the 
professional schools. The fact that college graduates 
are kept back from entering business life until they 
are twenty-two need not disturb us on economic 
grounds, because it is also a fact that the marked in- 
crease of college graduates in business life has coin- 
cided with the very period in which the age of 
graduation has been rising. But for those going into 
professional life the case is different. Taking eigh- 
teen as the average age of entrance to college, adding 
four years of college and three or, as it may soon be, 
four years of professional study, the young doctor or 
lawyer is not fledged until he is twenty-six. A year, 



80 ' AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

or even two years, may be saved by reducing tbe 
length of the college course. 

Let us admit, at once, that we are facing a serious 
economic question. The saving of a year or two in 
time and money will in many cases settle the question 
as to how extended an education a young man can get. 
Young men who must get to law or medicine by 
twenty-four must forego something if they enter col- 
lege at eighteen, l^o device will secure them eight 
years of educated life in six. The brighter and more 
mature among them may perhaps save a year by en- 
tering college at seventeen. But this does not meet 
the general difficulty. If by any chance they enter at 
sixteen, they will be found as a rule too immature 
mentally for the studies and too immature morally 
for the life of our larger modern colleges. This solu- 
tion may therefore be dismissed as insufficient and 
unwise. If the year or two years is to be saved, it 
must be taken in most instances from the college or 
from the professional school. 

We may as well admit that in such cases the college 
must suffer the loss, because the intending doctor or 
lawyer cannot escape the demands of the professional 
schools. His livelihood is conditioned on completing 
his professional education, and this settles the matter. 

Ent does it settle the general question of the proper 
length of the college course for those who have time 



LENGTH OF COLLEGE COURSE 81 

to take it ? What are we to do with the mass of stu- 
dents who can take four years of college ? Why must 
their course be shortened? It is a minority which 
goes on to law and medicine. Some better reason 
must be found than the fact that a part of this minor- 
ity cannot remain four years. If it were true, or if it 
becomes true, that the majority of young men suitable 
for college cannot stay throughout the present course, 
then it may be a shorter course must be established. 
Otherwise it does not appear that we are doing a 
wrong to students by holding them four years, unless 
it can also be shown that a three-year or a two-year 
course is intrinsically better than a four-year course 
for American young men. 

This is to me the one question of real difficulty. I 
am unable to see that young men generally will be 
better trained to begin as lawyers at twenty-four than 
at twenty-five or twenty-six. I am able to see that 
many cannot afford to wait so long, and must take 
what they can get in the shorter time. It is clear that 
some of them cannot take four years in college. It is 
also clear that giving them the bachelor's degree at 
the end of two years or three years will not give them 
an education of four years. It is the time taken, as 
well as the studies taken, that counts heavily if a per- 
manent impression is to be made. Extended time in 
residence given to unhurried study, and not rapidly 



82 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

formed acquaintance with a series of studies, is what 
is needed. And when we realize with what imperfect 
training so many boys come from the schools, it may 
easily take four years to outflank their deficiencies, 
correct their methods, and develop even a semblance 
of liberal culture. 

Why, then, if some of them must leave college, 
should they not leave, as some now do, at the end of 
two years or three years, taking with them their valu- 
able half-loaf or three-quarters loaf of college life and 
training? It is worth a great deal to them. They 
will find most of the professional schools ready to 
receive them, and some of them ready to give, if not 
the very best, at least a good professional education. 
The best of everything in education cannot be had 
without taking the best time needed. In fact we are 
exaggerating the situation, for if all professional 
schools would merely go so far as to exact at least 
two years of college as prerequisite to entrance, there 
would be a gain the country over in the quality of 
professional students. It may, perhaps, be thought 
that the three-year course will bring more students to 
college and more college graduates to professional 
schools. This is a matter of pure speculation. But 
suppose it does. Is it clear that we need more college 
students with shorter education than they have now ? 
Is it clear that we need proportionally more doctors 



LENGTH OF COLLEGE COURSE 83 

and lawyers ? The desired gain in quality of profes- 
sional students can be secured without destroying the 
four-year course, merely by exacting generally three 
years of college as a minimum entrance requirement. 
Has any American university gone farther than this 
in dealing with the students of its own college who 
enter its own law or medical school ? 

In the present condition of affairs in our land, 
viewed in its entirety, the question of entrance to pro- 
fessional schools and the question of the proper length 
of the college course are two distinct questions. By 
all means let there be a few leaders among the pro- 
fessional schools exacting a college degree for admis- 
sion, especially if it be possible to secure this on the 
basis of a full college course completed in the full 
time without haste or crowding. The time may per- 
haps come when all good schools will be able to follow 
their example. But it has not come yet. 

If, therefore, the college course is to be shortened, 
it should be because the shorter course is intrinsically 
better for the mass of college students. Is four years 
of American college education better than three ? 
Few will doubt it is better than two. Three years or 
f ®ur is the real question. 

That a change of profound importance has come 
over our colleges in the last thirty years none will 
deny. It is a change in tone and spirit. The gains 



84 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

in diversified opportunity and in student self-govern- 
ment have been immense. There have also been 
losses. In the large older colleges particularly there 
has been an accession of students who are attracted 
more by the social and athletic life than by studies. 
There has been a relaxing of effort, a disposition to 
look on college life as a pleasant social episode. The 
old-fashioned college with its simple programme of 
prescribed studies is gone. The so-called " elective 
system " has come in to replace it, wholly or partly. 
To rehabilitate the old state of things is impossible 
and undesirable. To endure the disintegration and 
confusion in intellectual standards which has ensued 
is also undesirable and, I believe, impossible. The 
strength of opinion favorable to the four-year course 
is found to be greatest where a large basis of pre- 
scribed studies has been kept. The arguments for a 
shorter course are most influential where elective free- 
dom prevails most. It is possible to argue with much 
effect for four years when it can be shown that a fine 
education is given because of the very definite correla- 
tion of studies to one end — ^namely, the acquainting 
of young men not only with the methods of knowl- 
edge, but with the substance of things important for 
all liberally educated men to know, the elemental 
things which, taken together, represent the stock and 
staple of our intellectual inheritance as a race. This 



LENGTH OF COLLEGE COURSE 85 

takes considerable time. Supplement this with a first 
exploration into the fields, or, far better, into some 
definitely mapped field of elective freedom corre- 
sponding to the well-ascertained aptitudes rather than 
the chance likings of the student, and four years will 
be found none too much. A natural break between 
the two lower and two upper years may thus easily 
be made. At this time, if the hard necessity arises so 
soon, let men leave who must leave early. The bach- 
elor's degree may then be kept for those who do the 
full work in the normal time. From this point of 
view the four-year course is in every way worth main- 
taining. 

But if the principle is to prevail that, once in col- 
lege, the student is to find all studies elective, the case 
is very different. No definite programme is com- 
pleted for the mass of students so far as concerns the 
specific substance of what they study. And without 
this an important common element is subtracted. A 
certain effect is lost. The common area of liberal 
culture, in which all educated men should be at home, 
tends to shrink and vanish. The solidarity of the 
student community, the intense esprit de corps which 
accompanies movement by college classes, the inti- 
macy of the community in things of common intel- 
lectual acquaintance — all these are weakened by dis- 
persion. The students are not travelling near enough 



86 AJklERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

in the same direction to be within easy hail and call. 
Such a condition is anomalous in education. Sec- 
ondary education below the college gains its effect 
from the correlation of prescribed studies, so as to 
form a general gymnastic of the mind. Professional 
education above the college is unattainable without 
the mastery of correlated subjects prescribed for all. 
The inner relations of the subjects studied, and not 
the preferences of immature minds, form the basis 
for an organized course of study, and should have 
much to do, perhaps most to do, with determining 
the length of any course. College education alone, 
under the plan of free election, is being allowed to 
wander aimlessly, as though there were no general and 
necessary rational relations according to which col- 
lege studies should be combined as they are in other 
fields of education. The student's preference, so often 
determined by inadequate knowledge or an easy- 
going following of the line of least resistance, is dig- 
nified by the name of " election," and the bewilder- 
ing mass of elective studies offered him is seriously 
called a " system." " System " it may be to others, 
but not to him. 

How can a definite argument for a discipline and 
culture of four years, rather than of three years, be 
erected on such a basis ? We need not waste time in 
exploring the tangle of inner reasons which indicate 



LENGTH OF COLLEGE COURSE 87 

that the indefiniteness and heterogeneity of a free 
elective course may be a proper, even an urgent, 
reason for shortening it. The mere fact that the 
movement for a three-year course is strongest where 
elective freedom is least restricted is enough indica- 
tion that a powerful cause operating inside the college 
course to shorten it is the inability of a purely elective 
scheme to fill out four years with profit to the mass 
of students. 

If the proposal were made to change a four-year 
course in elective studies to a three-year course with 
a large basis of prescribed studies, I confess the three- 
year course would seem to me a marked improvement. 
And unless something is done to reduce the tangle to 
order, the three-year course seems to be inevitable in 
some places. But if the proposal be to reduce the 
other type of four-year course to three years, then the 
loss is not only unnecessary, but is in every way un- 
desirable, because it means the loss of the crowning 
year in a definitely rounded plan, the consummate 
college year of intellectual development, privilege, 
and satisfaction. 

On the colleges, therefore, which believe in main- 
taining a large basis of prescribed studies as the one 
sure foundation for a rational plan of subsequent 
elective studies will rest the duty of maintaining a 
four-year course. They will need to make sure that 



88 AJMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

they work out their programme in true accordance 
with their academic confession of faith and secure to 
their students at all hazards the few fundamental 
studies, well and amply taught. They will need to 
be resolute in teaching young men that there is no 
real education without well-directed effort ; that it is 
not doing what a man likes or dislikes to do, but the 
constant exercise in doing what he ought to do in mat- 
ters of intellect as well as of conduct, whether he hap- 
pens to like it or not, that turns the frank, careless, 
immature, lovable school-boy into the strong, well- 
trained man capable of directing wisely himself and 
others. If they fail to do this with measurable suc- 
cess, they fail to justify their contention. If they 
succeed, the American college course of traditional 
length and largely prescribed content may be trusted 
to justify itself triumphantly. 



VI 

THE AMEKICAN COLLEGE ^ 

ITS PLACE AND IMPORTANCE 

The American college has no exact counterpart in the 
educational system of any other country. The ele- 
ments which compose it are derived, it is true, from 
European systems, and in particular from Great 
Britain. But the form under which these elements 
have been finally compounded is a form suggested 
and almost compelled by the needs of our national 
life. Of course it is far from true to say that Ameri- 
can colleges have been uninfluenced in their organiza- 
tion by European tradition. On the contrary, the 
primary form of organization found in our earliest 
colleges, such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, is in- 
herited from the collegiate life of the University of 
Cambridge. But it was subjected to modification at 
the very beginning, in order to adapt the infant col- 
lege to its community, and progressively modified 
from time to time in order to keep in close sympathy 

* A paper published for the Educational Exhibit of the United 
States at the International Exhibition in Paris, 1900, and the 
Universal Exposition in St. Louis, 1904. 

89 



90 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

with the civil, ecclesiastical, and social character of 
the growing x\merican nation. The outcome of all 
this has been an institution which, while deriving by 
inheritance the elements of its composition, and in 
some sense its form, has managed to develop for itself 
a form of organization which notably differs from the 
old-world schools. 

Moreover the college, as might be expected from 
the foregoing considerations, occupies the place of 
central importance in the historic outworking of 
American higher education, and remains to-day the 
one repository and shelter of liberal education as dis- 
tinguished from technical or commercial training, the 
only available foundation for the erection of univer- 
sities containing faculties devoted to the maintenance 
of pure learning, and the only institution which can 
furnish the preparation which is always desired, even 
though it is not yet generally exacted, by the better 
professional schools. Singularly enough, but not un- 
naturally, the relation of directive influence sustained 
to-day by our colleges to the university problem is 
not unlike the relation held in the Middle Ages by the 
inferior faculty of arts at the University of Paris to 
the affairs of the university as a whole. ^ The points 
of resemblance are marked and are of a generic char- 

^Rashdall: "Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages," VoL 
I, p. 318. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 91 

acter. In both cases the college, or faculty of arts, 
appears as the preliminary instructor in the essentials 
of liberal education. In both cases this earlier edu- 
cation is recognized as the proper prerequisite for 
later study in the professional faculties. In both 
cases the inferior faculty, even if still undeveloped 
or but partially developed, contains the germ of the 
higher university faculty of pure learning, the fac- 
ulty of arts, sciences, and philosophy. In this there is 
much that is remarkable, but nothing novel. For the 
American college in this respect merely perpetuates 
and develops a fundamental tradition of liberal learn- 
ing, which found its way from Paris through Oxford 
to Cambridge, and then from Cambridge to our 
shores. The parallel of our college history with the 
old-world history holds good in other important re- 
spects, and would be most interesting to trace. Still, 
in order to understand the precise nature and unique 
influence of the college in American education, it is 
not necessary here to trace step by step the story of 
its development, for in its various forms of present 
organization it reveals not only the normal type which 
has been evolved, but also survivals of past stages of 
development, instances of variation and even of de- 
generation from the type, and interesting present ex- 
periments which may to some extent foreshadow the 
future. 



92 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

THE OLD-FASHIONED COLLEGE 

The three commonly accepted divisions of educa- 
tion into the primary, secondary and higher stages, 
while fully recognized in America, are not followed 
rigorously in our organization. The primary educa- 
tion is more clearly separable from the secondary 
than is the secondary from the higher or university 
stage. The chief cause for this partial blending, or 
perhaps confusion, of the secondary and higher stages 
is the college. However illogical and even practically 
indefensible such a mixture may appear in the eyes 
of some very able critics, it is still true that this par- 
tial blending of two different things, commonly and 
wisely separated in other systems, has been compelled 
by the exigencies of our history and has at the same 
time been fruitful in good results. 

Let us then take as the starting-point of our in- 
quiry the fact that the American college, as con- 
trasted with European schools, is a composite thing — 
partly secondary and partly higher in its organiza- 
tion. It consists regularly of a four-year course of 
study leading to the bachelor's degree. Up to the 
close of the Civil War it was mainly an institution 
of secondary education, with some anticipations of 
university studies toward the end of the course. 
But even these embryonic university studies were 
usually taught as rounding out the course of dis- 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 93 

ciplinary education, rather than as subjects of free 
investigation. Boys entered college when they were 
fifteen or sixteen years of age. The age of graduation 
did not usually exceed twenty years. The course of 
preparation in the best secondary schools occupied 
four years, but many students took only three or even 
two years. In the better schools they studied Latin 
and Greek grammar, four books of Csesar, six books 
of Virgil, six orations of Cicero, three books of 
Xenophon and two of Homer, together with arith- 
metic, plane geometry (not always complete) and 
algebra to, or at most through quadratic equations. 
There were variations from this standard, but in 
general it may be safely asserted that the Latin, 
Greek, and mathematics specified above constituted as 
much as the stronger colleges required for entrance; 
while many weaker ones with younger students and 
lower standards were compelled to teach some of 
these preparatory studies in the first year or even in 
the first two years of the college course. With but 
few and unimportant exceptions the four-year course 
consisted of prescribed studies. They were English 
literature and rhetoric, Latin, Greek, mathematics, 
natural philosophy, chemistry, the elements of deduc- 
tive logic, moral philosophy and political economy, 
and often a little psychology and metaphysics. Per- 
haps some ancient or general history was added. 



94 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

Frencli and German were sometimes taught, but not 
to an important degree. At graduation the student 
received the degree of bachelor of arts, and then en- 
tered on the study of law, medicine, or theology at 
some professional school, or went into business or into 
teaching in the primary or secondary schools. Such, 
in barest outline, was the scheme of college education 
a generation ago. 



THE COTJESE 

At the present time things are very different. 
With the vast growth of the country in wealth and 
population since the Civil War there has come a mani- 
fold development. The old four-year course, consist- 
ing entirely of a single set of prescribed studies lead- 
ing to the one degree of bachelor of arts, has grown 
and branched in many ways. It has been modified 
from below, from above, and from within. The bet- 
ter preparation now given in thousands of schools 
has enabled colleges to ask for somewhat higher en- 
trance requirements and, what is more important, to 
exact them with greater firmness. The age of en- 
trance has increased, until at the older and stronger 
colleges the average is now about eighteen and a half 
years. A four-year course leading to a bachelor's de- 
gree remains, although in some quarters the increas- 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 95 

ing age of the students is creating a tendency to 
shorten the course to three years, in order that young 
men may not be kept back too long from entering 
upon their professional studies. It was an easy thing 
a generation ago for young men to graduate at twenty, 
and a bright man could do it earlier w^ithout too great 
difficulty. After two or three years spent in studying 
law or medicine he was ready to practise his profes- 
sion, and then began to earn his living at the age of 
twenty-two or twenty-three. This was within his 
reach. But to-day a college student is twenty-two 
years old at graduation — almost as old as his father 
or grandfather were when they had finished their 
professional studies. If he follows in their steps, he 
must wait until he is twenty-five to begin earning his 
living. Accordingly, boys are now passing in consid- 
erable numbers directly from secondary schools, 
which do not really complete their secondary educa- 
tion, to the professional schools, thus omitting college 
altogether. If this continues, the effect both on col- 
leges and professional schools will be discouraging. 
The problem is an economic one, and it is affecting 
college courses of study. One solution, as suggested 
above, is to shorten the course to three years. This 
has been advocated by President Eliot of Harvard. 
Three years is the length of the course in the under- 
graduate college established in connection with the 



96 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

Johns Hopkins University.^ Another proposal is to 
keep the fonr-year course and allow professional in 
place of liberal studies in the last year, thus enabling 
the student to save one year in the professional school. 
This experiment is being tried at Columbia. A third 
proposal is to keep the college course absolutely free 
from professional studies, but to give abundant op- 
portunities in the last year or even the last two years 
to pursue the liberal courses which most clearly un- 
derlie professional training, thus saving a year of 
professional study. That is, teach jurisprudence and 
history, but not technical law, or teach chemistry and 
biology, but not technical medicine, or teach Greek, 
oriental languages, history and philosophy, but not 
technical theology. This seems to be the trend of re- 
cent experiments in Yale and Princeton. The one 
common consideration in favor of all these proposals 
is that a year is saved. Against the three-year course, 
however, it is argued that there is no need to abolish 
the four-year course in order to save a year. Against 
the admission of professional studies it is argued that 
work done in a professional school ought not to count 
at the same time toward two degrees representing two 
radically different things. Against the proposal to 
allow the liberal studies which most closely underlie 

* The undergraduate college at Johns Hopkins is now placed 
on a four-year basis (1906). 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 97 

the professions, it is argued that this is a half-way 
measure, after all. ^N^evertheless for the present, and 
probably for a long time in most colleges, the four- 
year course is assured. 

ALTERATIONS lH THE COIS'TENT OF THE COURSE AND 
IN THE MEANING OF THE BACHELOe's DEGREE 

The four-year course, however, no longer leads 
solely to the degree of bachelor of arts, nor has this 
old degree itself remained unmodified. With the 
founding of schools of science, aiming to give a mod- 
ern form of liberal education based mainly on the 
physical and natural sciences, and yet only too often 
giving under this name a technological course, or a 
somewhat incongruous mixture of technical and lib- 
eral studies, the degree of bachelor of science came 
into use as a college degree. Then intermediate 
courses were constituted, resting on Latin, the modern 
languages, history, philosophy, mathematics, and 
science, and thus the degree of bachelor of letters or 
bachelor of philosophy came into use. Sometimes the 
various courses in civil, mechanical, mining or elec- 
trical engineering were made four-year undergradu- 
ate courses with their corresponding engineering 
degrees virtually rated as bachelor's degrees. Still 
other degrees of lesser importance came into vogue 
and obtained a footing here and there as proper de- 



98 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

grees to mark the completion of a four-year college 
course. The dispersing pressure of the newer studies 
and the imperious practical demands of American life 
proved too strong either to be held in form or to be 
kept out by the barriers of the old course of purely lib- 
eral studies with its single and definite bachelor of 
arts degree. 'New degrees were accordingly added to 
represent the attempted organization of the newer ten- 
dencies in courses of study according to their various 
types. The organization of such courses was natu- 
rally embarrassed by grave difficulties which are as 
yet only partially overcome. Compared with the old 
course they lacked and still lack definiteness of struct- 
ure. They aimed to realize new and imperfectly un- 
derstood conceptions of education, and were composed 
of studies whose inner content was changing rapidly, 
as in the case of the sciences, or else were " half-and- 
half " forms of education, difficult to arrange in a 
system that promised stability, as in the case of 
studies leading to the bachelor of letters or bachelor 
of philosophy. A graver source of trouble, in view of 
the too fierce practicality of American life, was the 
admission of various engineering and other technical 
studies as parallel undergraduate courses, thus tend- 
ing to confuse in the minds of young students the 
radical distinction between liberal and utilitarian 
ideals in education, and tending furthermore, by rea- 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 99 

son of the attractiveness of the " bread-and-butter " 
courses, to diminish the strength of the liberal studies. 
When in addition it is remembered that the newer 
courses, whether liberal, semiliberal, or technical, 
which found a footing of presumed equality alongside 
of the old bachelor of arts course, exacted less from 
preparatory schools in actual quantity of school-work 
necessary for entrance into college, it will be seen 
that for the newer class of students the level of 
preparation for college was really lowered. 

The present drift of opinion and action in colleges 
which offer more than one bachelor's degree is more 
reassuring than it was some twenty years ago. There 
is a noticeable tendency, growing stronger each year, 
to draw a sharper line between liberal and technical 
education and to retain undergraduate college educa- 
tion in liberal studies as the best foundation for 
technical studies, thus elevating the latter to a pro- 
fessional dignity comparable with law, medicine, and 
divinity. The more this conception prevails, the 
more will college courses in engineering be converted 
into graduate, or at least partially graduate courses. 
JSTo doubt most independent schools will continue to 
offer their courses to young students of college age, 
but where such schools have been associated as parts 
of colleges or universities the tendency to a clearer 
separation of technical from liberal studies in the 



100 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

manner indicated above seems likely to prevail. If 
this Happy result can be considered assured, then the 
undergraduate college course, the sole guarantee of 
American liberal culture, will have a good chance to 
organize itself in accordance with its own high ideals, 
however imperfectly it may have realized these ideals 
in the past. 

Another hopeful tendency which is gradually gath- 
ering strength is to give the various bachelor's de- 
grees more definite significance by making theni 
stand for distinct types of liberal or semiliberal edu- 
cation. Three such types or forms are now slowly 
evolving out of the mass of studies with increasing 
logical consistency. First comes the historic aca- 
demic course, attempting to realize the idea of a gen- 
eral liberal education, and consisting of the classical 
and modern literatures, mathematics, and science, 
with historical, political, and philosophical studies 
added, and leading to the bachelor of arts degree. 
The second is the course which aims to represent a 
strictly modern culture predominantly scientific in 
character, and culminating in the degree of bachelor 
of science. As this course originated in the demand 
for knowledge of the applied sciences in the arts and 
industries of modern life, the ideal of a purely mod- 
ern liberal culture, predominantly scientific in spirit, 
was not easy to maintain. On the contrary, the tech- 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 101 

nical aspects of the sciences taught tended more and 
more to create a demand for strictly technological in- 
struction to the exclusion of the theoretical and non- 
technical aspects. It is this cause more than any 
other which has tended to restrict the energies of 
schools of science to the production of experts in the 
various mechanical and chemical arts and industries 
and has caused them to do so little for the advance- 
ment of pure science. Conscious of this difficulty, 
many schools of science have heen giving larger place 
in the curriculum to some of the more available hu- 
manistic studies. Fuller courses in French and Ger- 
man have been provided for and the study of English 
has been insisted upon with sharper emphasis. Eco- 
nomics, modern history, and even the elements of 
philosophy have found place. Some improvement 
has also been effected by increasing the entrance re- 
quirements in quantity of school-work. But in spite 
of all these efforts the course still suffers from an 
inner antagonism between technical and liberal im- 
pulses, and until the bachelor of science course finally 
settles into a strictly technical form, or else comes to 
represent a strictly liberal modern culture, its stabil- 
ity cannot be regarded as assured. In the indepen- 
dent scientific schools, unassociated with colleges, it 
seems probable the course will keep or assume a highly 
technical form, but wherever it exists side by side 



102 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

with other bachelor's courses as a proposed represent- 
ative of some form of liberal education, it does seem 
inevitable that it will tend to conform to the ideal of 
a liberal modern culture, mainly scientific in char- 
acter. But even if this result be achieved, the proc- 
ess of achievement promises to be slow and difficult. 
Few American colleges are strong enough financially 
to make the experiment, which it must be admitted 
involves considerable financial risk, and even where 
the risk may be safely assumed there still remains a 
serious theoretical difficulty in realizing this form of 
liberal education. The antagonism between the tech- 
nical and liberal impulses in the course seems very 
difficult to eliminate completely. For if the question 
be asked, Why should an American college student 
seek as his liberal education the studies which repre- 
sent a purely modern culture rather than pursue the 
bachelor of arts course, which professes to stand for 
a more general culture? the preference of most stu- 
dents will be found to rest upon their instinct for 
something useful and immediately available, rather 
than on a desire for things intellectual. This con- 
stantly militates against devotion to the intellectual 
value of their modern studies and tends more and 
more to drag them toward technical standards. 

The third aspirant to be considered a type of lib- 
eral college education is the course intermediate in 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 103 

character between the two already discussed. It is 
labelled with the degree of bachelor of letters or bach- 
elor of philosophy. It differs from the other two 
courses mainly in its treatment of the classical lan- 
guages. In its desire to placate the practical spirit 
it drops Greek, but retains Latin both as an aid to 
general culture and as a strong practical help in learn- 
ing the modern languages. Notwithstanding its in- 
determinate and intermediate character, it is serving 
a valuable end by providing thousands of students, 
who do not care for the classical languages in their 
entirety, with a sufficiently liberal form of education 
to be of great service to them. It is by no means 
technical in spirit. Judged from the stand-point of 
the historic bachelor of arts course, it is a less gen- 
eral but still valuable culture. Judged from the 
stand-point of the bachelor of science course, it ap- 
pears to escape the unhappy conflict between the tech- 
nical and liberal impulses and anchors the student 
somewhat more firmly to fundamental conceptions 
of general education. 

These three are the principal forms of undergradu- 
ate college education which in any degree profess to 
stand as types of liberal culture in this country at the 
present time, and they sere usually labelled with three 
different degi*ees, as already indicated. 

But some colleges, following the example of Har- 



104 AlklERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

vard, have dealt with the bachelor's degree very dif- 
ferently. The degree of bachelor of arts has been re- 
tained as the sole symbol of liberal college education, 
but the meaning of the degree has been radically 
altered in order to make it sufficiently elastic to rep- 
resent the free selections and combinations made by 
the students themselves out of the whole range of lib- 
eral studies. In these colleges it therefore no longer 
stands for the completion of a definite curriculum 
composed of a few clearly related central studies con- 
stituting a positive type. What it does stand for is 
not quite so easy to define, because of the variation 
of practice in different colleges and the wide diversity 
in the choice of studies exercised by individual stu- 
dents in any one college. But, generally speaking, it 
means that the student is free to choose his own 
studies. In the undergraduate college connected with 
the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore choice is 
regulated by prescribing moderately elastic groups of 
cognate studies, the student being required to say 
which group he will choose. In Harvard College the 
range of choice is restricted in no such way. The 
student is allowed to choose what he prefers, subject 
to such limitations as the priority of elementary to 
advanced courses in any subject, and the necessary 
exclusions compelled by the physical necessity of 
placing many exercises at the same time, in order to 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 105 

accommodate the hundreds of courses offered within 
the limits of the weekly schedule. In Columbia Col- 
lege the degree is still different in respect to the mode 
of the student^s freedom of choice^ and especially in 
the admission of professional studies in the last year 
of the course. A Columbia student in his senior year 
may be pursuing his first year's course in law or 
medicine, and at the same time receiving double 
credit for this work, both toward the degree of bach- 
elor of arts and toward the professional degree of doc- 
tor of medicine or bachelor of laws. These examples 
are sufficient to indicate the variety of meaning found 
in colleges which have changed the historical signifi- 
cance of the bachelor of arts degree. 

OTHER PHASES OF CHANGE 

Up to this point we have looked at the American 
college mainly from the outside. We observed in the 
college of a generation ago an institution of liberal 
education providing a single four-year course, consist- 
ing entirely of prescribed studies for young men from 
sixteen to twenty years of age, and culminating in 
one bachelor's degree of fairly uniform intentional 
meaning. We observe in the college of to-day the de- 
veloped successor of the earlier college, providing a 
four-year course consisting generally of a mixture of 
prescribed and elective studies in widely varying pro- 



106 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

portions. The average age of the students has in- 
creased nearly two years, and at the end of the course 
there is a multiform instead of a uniform bachelor's 
degree, or in some instances a single bachelor's degree 
of multiform meaning. To some extent the under- 
graduate collegian has become a university student. 
To what extent ? is the real question around which a 
controversy of vital importance is raging. 

The profound change indicated by these external 
symptoms, a change so full of peril in the directions 
of disintegration and confusion, and yet so full of 
promise if rationally organized, has been in progress 
since the Civil War, and is still steadily and some- 
what blindly working along toward its consummation. 
An exact estimate of such a state of affairs, a diagno- 
sis which shall at the same time have the value of a 
prognosis for all colleges, is manifestly impossible at 
the present time. The difficult thing in any such at- 
tempt is not merely to understand the change from a 
uniform to a multiform mode of life and organiza- 
tion, but to understand what it really is that is chang- 
ing. This something that is changing is the old-fash- 
ioned American college. It seems simple enough to 
understand what this was, but at the same time it 
needs to be remembered that the old-fashioned 
colleges, while aiming to follow out a single course 
of study ending in a single degree of single meaning. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 107 

nevertheless did not succeed in exhibiting such close 
individual resemblance to' each other as is to be found, 
let us say, among the lycees of France, the public 
schools of England, or the gymnasia of Germany. 
Many so-called colleges really served as preparatory 
schools for larger and stronger colleges, and many so- 
called universities did not attain and in fact do not 
yet attain to the real, though less pretentious dignity 
of the better colleges. In fact ^^ university," as 
President Oilman observes, is too often only a " ma- 
jestic synonym " for " college." To aid in giving as 
much simplicity and consequent clearness to our view 
as is necessary to disclose the leading features of the 
situation, neglecting all the others, we may therefore 
at once discard from our consideration all except the 
better colleges which, when taken together, exhibit the 
dominant tendency. 

How, then, have these better colleges changed ? 
Speaking generally, they have changed in a way 
which reflects the diversified progress of the country, 
and yet in some sense they have had an important in- 
fluence in leading and organizing the national prog- 
ress itself. Then, too, the change is not merely a 
change of form, but of spirit. In the older days 
scarcely any college had as many as four or five hun- 
dred students, and the range of studies, even if im- 
portant, was limited. The faculty of the college ex- 



108 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

ercised a strong paternal anxiety and oversight on 
behalf of the morals and religion, as well as over the 
studies of the students. The authority of the presi- 
dent was almost patriarchal in character. "Not highly 
developed insight into the problems of education, but 
plain common-sense in governing students was the 
condition of a successful presidency. The life of the 
students was mildly democratic, being tempered by 
the generally beneficent absolutism of the president 
and the faculty, which in turn was itself tempered by 
occasional student outbreaks. According to the re- 
port ^ of the United States Commissioner of Educa- 
tion there were at the end of the century 4Y2 colleges,^ 
excluding those for women only. Seventy-seven of 
these enrolled more than 200 undergraduate students, 
and of these 77 colleges 24 enrolled over 500, and 8 
over 1,000. The range of studies, as already men- 
tioned, has increased. With the strengthening of 
preparatory courses, the school preparation of stu- 
dents has improved, and at the same time their aver- 
age age at entrance has risen. The number of pro- 
fessors has multiplied. The old-fashioned college 
professor, the man of moderate general scholarship 

' There are over five hundred "colleges and universities" now 
(1906). 

^ That is, 472 " colleges and universities." As almost every 
university, real or nominal, contains a college, the total of 472 
colleges is approximately correct. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 109 

and of austere yet kindly interest in the personal wel- 
fare of those he taught, still remains ; but at his side 
has appeared more and more frequently the newer 
type of American college professor, the man of high 
special learning in some one subject or branch of that 
subject, who considers it his primary duty to investi- 
gate, his next duty to teach, and his least duty to ex- 
ercise a personal care for the individual students. 
Perhaps the old type will be replaced by the new. 
Such a result, however, would not be an unmixed 
gain, and it is indeed fortunate that our finest college 
professors to-day endeavor to combine high special 
attainments as scholars with interest in the per- 
sonal well-being of their students. The authority of 
the faculty is still sufficient, but is exercised differ- 
ently. Student self-government is the order of the 
day, and the more this prevails the less is exercise of 
faculty authority found to be necessary. With stu- 
dent self-government there has naturally come an 
increase of intensity in the democratic character of 
student life. The presidents of our larger colleges, 
and even of many of the smaller, are becoming more 
and more administrative officers and less and less 
teachers. It is no doubt something of a loss that the 
students should not have the intimate personal ac- 
quaintance with the president enjoyed by students a 
generation ago, but this cannot be avoided in places 



110 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

where a thousand undergraduates are enrolled. Out- 
door sports have also entered to modify and improve 
the spirit of our academic life. They have developed 
their own evilS;, but at the same time have done won- 
ders for the physical health of the students, the 
diminution of student disorders, and the fostering of 
an intense esprit de corps. In the reaction from the 
asceticism of our early college life there is little doubt 
our athletics have gone too far ; so far as to divert in 
a noticeable degree the student's attention from his 
studies. But it is gratifying to notice that the abuses 
of college athletics can be corrected, and that they are 
to some extent self -correcting. It must not be forgot- 
ten that unlike his father or grandfather, whose col- 
lege life was so largely spent in-doors, the American 
student of to-day lives out-doors as much as possible. 
The moral and religious spirit of the college of to- 
day is inherited from the old college. JSTearly all our 
colleges are avowedly or impliedly Christian. A re- 
spectable minority of them are Roman Catholi(i The 
large majority are under Protestant influences, some- 
times denominational, but generally of an unsectarian 
character even in the church colleges. In many of 
them the student is expected to attend certain relig- 
ious exercises, such as morning prayers; in many, 
however, all such attendance is voluntary. The vol- 
untary religious life of the undergraduates finds its 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 111 

expression in various societies, which endeavor to 
promate the Christian fellowship and life of their 
members. While moral and religious convictions are 
freer and sometimes laxer than of old, the Christian 
life in our colleges is real and pervasive. 

As a rule the student is so absorbed by the scholas- 
tic, athletic, and miscellaneous activities of his college 
that he sees little outside social life. This is particu- 
larly true in colleges which enjoy truly academic 
seclusion amid rural surroundings, for here more 
than anywhere else is to be seen the natural unper- 
turbed outworking of the undergraduate spirit. It 
is the old spirit enlarged and liberalized — the spirit 
which finds its delight in a free, democratic, self- 
respecting enjoyment of the four years which are so 
often looked back upon as the happiest four years of 
life. 

INCREASED FEEEDOM IIT STUDIES. DEVELOPMENT OF 
ELECTIVE COURSES 

Such are some of the non-scholastic aspects of our 
present college life. They are important in that they 
give tone to the whole picture, but they do not account 
for what, after all, is the great transformation which 
has been wrought, for that transformation is dis- 
tinctly scholastic. It is caused by the increase of stu- 
dents, their better preparation, and their greater age. 



112 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

The studies which bj common consent made up the 
curriculum leading to the old bachelor of arts degree 
are now being completed before the end, sometimes 
by the middle of the college course. There is to-day 
no reason why a young man of twenty should not 
know as much as his father knew at twenty. But at 
twenty his father had graduated with the bachelor of 
arts degree, whereas at twenty the son is only half 
way through his college course. In other words, he 
has passed the time of prescription and entered upon 
the time of his freedom. As this fact forced itself 
more and more upon the older and stronger colleges, 
experiments were made in granting a limited amount 
of elective freedom to students in the latter part of 
their course ; first in the senior year and then in the 
junior year, until in some instances the whole four- 
year course is now elective. The solid block of four 
years' prescribed study has been cleft downward, part 
of the way at least, by the " elective " wedge, thin at 
its entering edge, but widening above the more it 
enters and descends. To-day the problem of the re- 
lation of prescribed to elective studies is a question of 
constant interest and perpetual readjustment. On the 
whole, the area of elective opportunity is extending 
downward, but whether this downward extension is 
being accomplished by injuring the foundations of 
liberal education, is to-day as grave a question as any 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 113 

we have to meet. In some colleges a student may ob- 
tain the bachelor of arts degree without studying any 
science, or he may omit his classics, or he may know 
nothing of philosophy. The solutions offered for this 
perplexing problem are many. 

The first proposal, which has now scarcely an ad- 
vocate, except possibly some laudatores temporis acti, 
is plainly an impossible one. It is to insist on the 
old-fashioned four-year prescribed course. But the 
old-fashioned course is gone. It cannot be restored, 
because it no longer suits our age. Young men will 
not go to college and remain there until the age of 
twenty-two years without some opportunity to exer- 
cise freedom of choice in their studies. 

The second proposal is to constitute the undergrad- 
uate course entirely, or almost entirely, of elective 
studies. It is argued that when a young man is eigh- 
teen or nineteen years of age, he is old enough to 
choose his liberal studies, and that his own choice will 
be better for him individually than any prescription 
the wisest college faculty may make. The advocates 
of this view admit its dangers. They see the perils 
of incoherency and discontinuity in the choice of 
studies. They see that many students are influenced, 
not by the intrinsic value of the studies, but by their 
liking for this or that instructor, or the companion- 
ship of certain students^ or for the easiness of those 



114 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

crowded courses which in college slang are called 
" softs '' or " snaps '' or " cinches.'' Yet they argue 
that the college student must be free at some time, 
that his sense of responsibility will be developed the 
sooner he is compelled to choose for himself, and that 
he will have the stimulating and sobering conscious- 
ness that what he does is his own act and not the pre- 
scription of others for him. Those who oppose this 
view argue that the academic freedom here proposed 
belongs to university rather than to college students ; 
that the American freshman is not a university stu- 
dent in the sense in which that term has been com- 
monly understood in the educated world. He has not 
spent eight, nine, or ten years in secondary studies, 
as is the case in France, England, or Germany. On 
the contrary, he has usually spent not more than four 
years in such secondary studies — occasionally a year 
or so more. At eighteen or nineteen years of age, he, 
therefore, comes to college with less training and 
mental maturity than the French, English, or Ger- 
man youth possesses on entering his university. If, 
therefore, he is to be as well educated as they are, 
some of his time in college, the first two years at least, 
should be spent in perfecting his properly secondary 
education before entering upon that elective freedom 
which, as is generally conceded, has a place and a 
large place in our present undergraduate courses. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 115 

The arguing on this question has been interminable, 
and almost every intellectual interest of our colleges 
is bound up in its proper solution. 

A third proposal is a conservative modification of 
the one just mentioned. It is to prescribe groups of 
cognate studies with the object of concentrating at- 
tention on related subjects in that field v^hich the 
student may prefer, as, for example, physical science 
or ancient literature or philosophy. Of course the 
advantage claimed for this mode is that it allows the 
student to choose the field of study he likes, and then 
safeguards him against incoherency by requiring him 
to pursue a group of well-related courses in that field. 
Or he may elect the " old-fashioned college course," 
if he likes. The advocates of wider freedom object 
to this as fettering spontaneity of choice, as not recog- 
nizing the fact that there are many students for whom 
it is advantageous to choose a study here and there at 
will, as a piece of side work outside the chosen field 
of their activity. The objectors to this plan of re- 
stricted groups and also to the plan of practically un- 
restricted freedom, assert that the fundamental diffi- 
culty in basing any college course on a single group 
of cognate studies within some one field is that it 
offers temptations to premature specialization at the 
expense of liberal education. 

Still another proposal remains to be considered. It 



116 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

is the proposal of those who believe that the best type 
of liberal education is to be found in the historic 
bachelor of arts course, which has been the centre and 
strength of American college life. They concede, 
however, that the other bachelor's courses which have 
been established will give a valuable education to 
many, provided these courses are consistently organ- 
ized according to their own ideals. They hold that it 
is possible to ascertain with sufficient exactness just 
what studies ought to be prescribed as integral parts 
of these courses, and that it is the preliminary train- 
ing given in these prescribed studies which develops 
maturity in the young student and enables him to 
choose intelligently his later elective studies. At the 
present time, in their view, it is not wise to introduce 
elective studies until about the middle of the college 
course. These studies, once introduced, should them- 
selves be organized and related in a system, and con- 
nected with the underlying system of prescribed 
studies. The principle of freedom should be intro- 
duced gradually, not suddenly. A form of this view 
which finds a good deal of support is that elective 
studies should be introduced first of all in the form 
of extensions of subjects already studied by the stu- 
dent, in order that he may make his first experiment 
of choice in an area where he is most familiar. Ac- 
cording to this view the second stage of elective 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 117 

studies should be the introduction of large general 
courses in leading subjects, accompanied or flanked 
by special courses for students of exceptional ability 
in special directions, and finally leading to as high a 
degree of specialization as the resources of the college 
will allow. 

But in this region the American college merges 
itself into the university, and it may be fairly asserted 
that in the last year and in some colleges in the last 
two years the student is really a university student. 
In these various ways we are to-day experimenting in 
order to find a form under which to organize the rap- 
idly increasing mass of elective studies. 

MODES OF INSTRUCTION. ACADEMIC HONORS 

Instruction is still mainly conducted by recitation 
and lecture, the recitation finding its chief place in 
the earlier and the lecture in the later part of the 
course. For purposes of recitation the classes are 
divided into sections of twenty-five or thirty students, 
and the exercise is usually based on a definitely al- 
lotted portion of some standard text-book. Much has 
been done to improve the character of this exercise. 
The attempt is made to make it something more vital 
than the mere listening to students as they recite what 
they have learned. The correction of mistakes, the 
attempt to lead the student along so as to discover for 



118 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

himself the cause of his mistakes, the endeavor to 
teach the entire class through the performance of each 
individual, to carry the whole group along as one man 
and thus conduct them through a stimulating and 
pleasant hour, is the aim of the more skilful instruc- 
tors. Variety and consequent freshening of attention 
and effort are added by setting collateral topics of 
special interest to this or that student, for him to 
look up somewhat independently. And it must be 
confessed that the professors most skilled in the art 
of conducting recitations, rather than those who de- 
pend wholly on lectures, leave the most abiding im- 
pression. The old-fashioned recitation too often put 
the student into a laborious treadmill, and monot- 
ony was the result. But the best recitations in our 
colleges to-day are fine examples of dialectic play 
between instructor and student, and the best moments 
of such exercises are remembered with enthusiasm. 
While instruction by recitation continues with effec- 
tiveness in the latter part of the course, especially with 
smaller groups of students, yet instruction by lecture 
is the rule. The lecturer may have to face a class 
which enrolls as many students as the whole college 
contained a generation ago. Two or three hundred 
may assemble to hear him. lie delivers his lecture, 
while those before him take notes or sometimes, as 
they listen, read the outline of his discourse in a 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 119 

printed syllabus prepared for the use of the class, and 
add such jottings as may seem desirable. In many 
lecture courses the recitation is employed as an 
effective auxiliary. 

But other forms of instruction find place. In all 
except the elementary courses in science the labora- 
tory plays a most important part, and even in the 
lectures in the introductory courses in physics, chem- 
istry, or biology full experimental illustration is the 
rule. Then, too, the library serves as a sort of labora- 
tory for the humanistic studies. Students are en- 
couraged to learn the use of the college library as aux- 
iliary to the regular exercises of the curriculum. 
Certain books are appointed as collateral reading, and 
the written examination at the end of the term often 
takes account of this outside reading. But Ameri- 
can students read too little. That prolonged reading, 
which gives such wide and assuring acquaintance 
with the important literature of any subject, is as yet 
unattempted in a really adequate degree.^ 

The academic year is divided into two, and some- 
times into three terms. At the end of each term the 
student is required to pass a fairly rigorous set 
of written examinations. Oral examinations have 
largely disappeared. Sometimes a high record of at- 

* The preceptorial plan in Princeton, introduced in 1905, is 
intended to develop extensive and critical reading alongside the 

courses of instruction. 



120 AIMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

tainment in recitations during the term entitles a stu- 
dent to exemption from examination, but this is not 
common. In awarding honors for scholarly pro- 
ficiency the old academic college confined itself almost 
entirely to general honors for eminence in the whole 
round of studies. The " first honor-man '' in older 
days was the hero and pride of his class. At gradua- 
tion he usually delivered the valedictory or else the 
Latin salutatory. Honors for general eminence still 
remain in most colleges. The rank list of the class at 
gTaduation either arranges the students in ordinal 
position (in which case the first honor-man still ap- 
pears) or else divides the class into a series of groups 
arranged in order of general scholarly merit. In such 
cases the old first honor-man is one of the select few 
who constitute the highest group in the class. But 
special honors in particular studies, while not un- 
known in the past, are really a development of our 
time. Undoubtedly they have tended to increase the 
interest of abler students in their favorite studies. A 
student trying for special honors is, of course, special- 
izing in some sense, though he is not ordinarily pur- 
suing original research. He is rather enlarging and 
deepening his acquaintance with some one important 
subject, such as history or mathematics. But some- 
times he is beginning independent investigation, and 
thus passes beyond the collegiate sphere of study. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 121 

STUDENT LIFE 

Let "US try to picture the career of a young Ameri- 
can of the usual type at one of our older Eastern col- 
leges to-day. At eighteen years of age he has com- 
pleted a four-year course in some secondary school, 
let us say at a private academy in the Middle States, 
or some flourishing Western high school. He does not 
need to make the long journey to his future college in 
order to be examined for entrance, but finds in the 
distant town where he lives, or at least in some neigh- 
boring city, a local entrance examination conducted 
by a representative of his intended college. The days 
and exact hours of examination and the examination 
papers are the same as for the examination held at 
the college. His answers are sent on to be marked 
and estimated. In a fortnight or so he receives notice 
of his admission to the freshman class. 

When the long summer vacation is over he sets out 
for his college. Having passed his entrance examina- 
tions, he is now entitled to secure rooms in one of the 
dormitories, or else to find quarters outside the college 
campus in town. His name is duly enrolled in the 
matriculation book and his student career begins. He 
usually comes with an earnest purpose to study, or at 
least to be regular in all his attendance. His newness 
and strangeness naturally pick him out for a good 



122 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

deal of notice on the part of the older students, es- 
pecially those of the sophomore class. He is subjected 
to some good-natured chaffing and guying, and per- 
haps to little indignities. If he takes it good-natur- 
edly, the annoyance soon ceases. If, however, he 
shows himself bumptious or opinionated or vain or 
" very fresh," his troubles are apt to continue. Un- 
fortunately it is not impossible they will culminate in 
some act of mean bullying, known in college parlance 
as " hazing." The entering freshman is too often like 
the newly arrived slave mentioned in Tacitus — 
conservis ludihrio est; and it would be little comfort 
for him to know that in this respect he is also a lineal 
successor of the hejaunus, the freshman " fledgling " 
among the students of medieval Paris. But the daily 
round of college exercises demands his attention, and 
in the classroom he begins to pass through a process 
of attrition more beneficent in its spirit. Under the 
steady measuring gaze of the instructor, and the un- 
uttered but very real judgment of his classmates who 
sit about him, he begins to measure himself and to be 
measured by college standards. Probably for the first 
time in his life he is compelled to recognize that he 
must stand solely on his merits. The helps and con- 
solations of home and of the limited circle in which 
his boyhood was fostered and sheltered are far away. 
He is learning something not down in the books ! and 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 123 

what he is thus discovering is well pictured in the 
words of Professor Hibben : " There is a fair field to 
all and no favor. Wealth does not make for a man 
nor the lack of it against him. The students live their 
lives upon one social level. There is a deep-seated in- 
tolerance of all snobbishness and pretension. The 
dictum of the 'varsitj field, ' ]^o grand-stand play- 
ing ! ' obtains in all quarters of the undergTaduate 
life. It signifies no cant in religion ; no pedantry in 
scholarship; no affectation in manners; no pretence 
in friendship. This is the first and enduring lesson 
which the freshman must learn. He learns and he 
forgets many other lessons, but this must be held in 
lively remembrance until it has become a second 
nature." But he has many encouragements. He is 
passing out of callow youth toward manhood, and his 
classmates are in the same situation with him. Here 
is the impulse which suddenly sweeps the whole en- 
tering class together in intimate comradeship. And 
so he starts out with his companions on the ups and 
downs of his four-year journey. 'No wonder so many 
college graduates say freshman year was the most 
valuable of all — it was surely the hardest. His col- 
lege comradeship continues and constitutes his social 
world. Day after day, term after term, they are 
thrown together in all the relationships of student 
life. In the classroom, at the " eating clubs," at the 



124 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

athletic games, in the musical, literary, and religious 
societies, in scenes of exuberant jollification and care- 
less disorder, and in endless criticism of the faculty 
or of the various courses of study, how their frank and 
unconventional ways constantly surprise and be- 
wilder the commonplace American philistine! You 
may pass across the lawns of many a campus at any 
hour of the day and almost any hour of the night in 
term-time, and rarely is there a time when some stu- 
dent life is not astir. Some are thronging toward the 
lecture-hall to the punctual ringing of the college 
bell, meeting returning throngs whose exercises are 
just finished. They are walking by twos or threes, 
smoking or chatting or mildly " playing horse " in 
some very pleasant way, unmindful and probably un- 
aware of Lord Chesterfield's horrified injunction to 
his son: " ISTo horse-play, I beseech of you.'' Or they 
are thronging to fill the " bleachers " at a base-ball or 
foot-ball game that is about to be played on the college 
grounds. The different varieties of the college cheer 
startle the air, and afford some color of excuse to the 
ingenious hypothesis that our student cheers are de- 
rived from Indian war-whoops. Or else when they 
are assembled in Sunday chapel, a decorous but not 
always solemn audience, their capacity for " simulta- 
neous emotion " appears in their spirited singing of a 
favorite hymn, or perhaps shows itself in the sudden 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 125 

sensation that sweeps across the chapel like a lightly 
rustling breeze in response to an inopportune remark 
of some inexperienced visiting clergyman. Or in the 
moonlit evenings of October, the time when the trees 
are turning red and yellow, their long processions 
pass to and fro, singing college songs. Truly the 
American collegian is brimful of the " gregarious 
instinct." 

In addition to this ever-present gregarious com- 
radeship which environs and inspires him, our enter- 
ing freshman finds the deeper intimacies of close in- 
dividual friendship. As a matter of course he has 
some one most intimate friend, generally his room- 
mate or " chum." Side by side, they mingle with 
their fellows. They stand together and, it may be, 
they fall together, and then rise together. And thus 
the class is paired off, and yet not»to the lessening of 
the deep class fellowship. Here indeed is a form of 
communism, temporary and local, but most intense. 
They freely use things in common, not excepting the 
property of the college. The distinction between 
meum and iuum does not hold rigorously. Ta tmv 
(j)'CK(Dv KOLvd said the ancient poet, and so say they. 
Accordingly a desirable hat or scarf or some article of 
athletic costume changes ownership again and again, 
with nothing sought in return. They are welcome 
to enter one another's rooms at pleasure and use their 



126 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

friends' tobacco and stationery, or to borrow such 
articles of furniture and bric-a-brac as will brighten 
their own rooms for some special occasion. The 
doors of their apartments are commonly left open; 
sometimes a latch-string is ingeniously arranged so 
the door can be opened from the outside. Money, 
however, stands on a different basis from other valu- 
ables. It is freely loaned for an indefinite time, but 
is strictly repaid. A student who lends his fellow 
money at interest cannot live in a college community. 

Our student, unless he is an unusual recluse, takes 
some part in athletics. If he is not able to win a 
place on the foot-ball team or base-ball nine or crew, 
which represents his alma mater in intercollegiate 
contests, he is very likely to be found playing ball in 
some organization improvised for the day, or trying 
his hand at tennis or golf. The bicycle is a necessity 
of his life, and on it he rides to recitations and lect- 
ures, to his meals and to the athletic field. 

He has still other interests outside the curriculum. 
He may be a member of the voluntary religious so- 
ciety of the students. Perhaps he gets a place on the 
glee club or dramatic club. He may become one of 
the editors of the daily college paper or of the 
monthly literary magazine. Perhaps he is manager 
or assistant business manager for one or another un- 
dergraduate organization. Then there are the whist 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 127 

clubs and time-consuming chess clubs. There are 
also circles for outside reading and discussion spring- 
ing up around the course of study, as well as the so- 
cieties which train in speaking and debating. Per- 
haps he may win the distinction of representing his 
college in an intercollegiate debate, and success in 
intercollegiate debating is highly coveted. The con- 
testants are greatly honored, for debating and ath- 
letics form the principal bond of union between the 
different colleges and give to their participants inter- 
collegiate distinction. 

Until the student passes out of freshman year, he 
is not always free to choose what kind of clothes he 
will wear. A freshman wearing a tall hat and carry- 
ing a walking-stick is an offence to the* other classes. 
In some colleges freshmen are not allowed to wear the 
colors, except on rare occasions. But as soon as he 
becomes a sophomore he is free to do as he likes. 
Then he and his classmates may suddenly appear 
wearing various hats, picturesque and often grotesque 
in appearance, and revel particularly in golfing suits. 
Toward the close of the course their daily dress be- 
comes more conventional, though the universal in- 
terest in athletics continues to affect the student mode 
all the way to the end. He has other amusements 
besides athletics, and these again are found in the 
student circle. His briarwood pipe goes with him 



128 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

almost everywhere. He smokes as he studies; he 
smokes at the games. Seated side by side with thou- 
sands of other students and alumni at the great in- 
tercollegiate matches, he helps form the fragrant 
cloud of blue incense that rises from the " bleachers '' 
and drifts over the field. In the evening, when the 
work of the scholastic day is done, he sits with his 
comrades at an unconventional " smoker," or else 
they may gather round the table of some restaurant 
with pipe and " stein " ; for the American student 
who drinks at all prefers beer to either wine or 
whiskey. At such evening sessions the different 
phases of student politics are discussed again and 
again. College songs are sung, the air being carried 
in that sonorous baritone which is the dominant 
sound in all our student music. Tales and jests fill 
out the hour. At the end the college cheer is given 
as the men start strolling homeward, singing as they 
go. Arrived on the campus they disperse, and their 
good-night calls echo from the doors and windows of 
the different dormitories. And so the day ends 
where it began ; within that closed circle where every 
student lives in " shouting distance " of the others. 
Our former freshman is getting on bravely toward 
the end of his course. He is now a free, familiar, 
established denizen of his college. He " owns '' it. 
l^ew freshmen, unpleasantly raw and needing to be 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 129 

taught their place — new freshmen so different from 
what he is and yet so like what he once was, are 
crowding in at the bottom of the course. They look 
up to him and his compeers in the senior class with 
no little awe and hope. What he is, they may become. 
In him they " see their finish.'' In them he reluct- 
antly recalls his beginnings. The closing months of 
senior year pass swiftly. His class procession is pre- 
paring to march out into the world and there take its 
place as a higher order of freshmen in the long file of 
the classes of alumni advancing with their thinning 
ranks toward middle manhood and beyond — and 
when commencement is over his undergraduate life 
is ended. 

What has he acquired in the four years ? At least 
some insight into the terms and commonplaces of lib- 
eral learning and some discipline in the central cate- 
gories of knowledge, some moral training acquired 
in the punctual performance of perhaps unwelcome 
daily duty and some reverence for things intellectual 
and spiritual. He is not only a very different man 
from what he was when he entered, but very different 
from what he could have become had he not entered. 
He is wiser socially. He is becoming cosmopolitan. 
Awkwardness, personal eccentricity, conceit, diffi- 
dence, and all that is callow or froward or perverse 
has been taken from him, so far as the ceaseless at- 



130 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

trition of his fellow students and professors has 
touched him. He has heen unconsciously developed 
into the genuine collegian. He is still frank and un- 
conventional. But he has become more tolerant, bet- 
ter balanced, more cultivated and more open- 
minded, and thus better able to direct himself and 
others. This is the priceless service his college has 
rendered him. It is little wonder his student affilia- 
tions last. As he goes out to take his place among the 
thousands of his fellow alumni, it is natural that his 
and their filial devotion to their academic mother 
should last through life. He will return with his 
class at their annual or triennial or decennial or later 
pilgrimages to the old place. ISTo matter what uni- 
versity he may subsequently attend^ here or abroad, 
his college allegiance remains unshaken. It is this 
which explains the active interest shown by our 
alumni. In the best sense they advertise their college 
to the public, and it is to their exertions the recent 
rapid advancement of many of our colleges is largely 
due. 

ORGANIZATION AND ADMINISTRATION. STUDENT 
EXPENSES 

The form of government is simple. A college cor- 
poration, legally considered, consists of a body of 
men who have obtained the charter, and who hold and 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 131 

administer the property. Where a particular state 
has established a college or even a university, which 
regularly includes a college, the members of the cor- 
poration are commonly styled regents, and are ap- 
pointed by the state to hold office for a limited term 
of years. But most colleges have been established as 
private corporations. In this case the title is vested 
in a board of trustees, sometimes composed of mem- 
bers who hold office for life, or else composed of these 
associated with others who are elected for a term of 
years. Boards of trustees holding office for life usu- 
ally constitute a close corporation, electing their own 
successors as vacancies occur. The two chief func- 
tions of such governing bodies, whether known as 
regents or trustees or by any other name, are to safe- 
guard the intent of the charter and to manage the 
property. They give stability to our college system. 
To carry out the main purpose for which the charter 
was obtained they create a faculty of professors and 
instructors and intrust the general headship to a 
president. The president and professors usually hold 
office for life. In some places provision is beginning 
to be made for the retirement of professors on pen- 
sions as they grow old. Instructors and sometimes 
assistant professors are appointed for a limited time, 
such appointments being subject to renewal or pro- 
motion. In the larger colleges the president is as- 



132 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

sisted in his administrative work by one or more 
deans. By immemorial tradition the president and 
faculty are charged with the conduct of the entire in- 
struction and discipline. They have the power to 
admit and dismiss students. The conferring of de- 
grees belongs to the corporation, but this power is 
almost invariably exercised according to recommen- 
dations made by the faculty. Honorary degrees, 
however, are sometimes given by the trustees or re- 
gents on their own initiative. 

In state colleges the income is derived from taxa- 
tion ; in others from endowments, often supplemented 
by annual subscriptions for special purposes. The 
increase of income of a college founded by a state de- 
pends on the increase of the wealth of the state and 
the liberality of disposition shown by the legislature. 
State colleges receive few private gifts. But the 
private colleges are cut off from dependence on the 
state, and have to rely on private gifts. This stream 
of private liberality flows almost unceasingly. The 
fact that many colleges are integral parts of real or so- 
called universities makes it difficult to say how much 
the specifically collegiate endowments and incomes 
amount to. But a few significant facts may be men- 
tioned. 'No college president, unless he is at the 
same time the president of a university, receives as 
high a salary as $10,000 annually. He is more 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 133 

likely to receive $4,000, $5,000, or $6,000. Two 
thousand dollars is considered a good professor's 
salary in small colleges; $3,000 is a usual salary in 
the larger colleges, while few professors receive more 
than $4,000. 

The expenses of individual students vary greatly. 
In some places there is no charge for tuition; in 
others they must pay as much as $100 or $150. In 
little country colleges the total cost for a year often 
falls within $300 ; in the larger old Eastern colleges, 
drawing patronage from all parts of the land, the 
student who must pay all his bills and receives no aid 
in the form of a scholarship can hardly get along with 
less than $600 or $700, exclusive of his expenses in 
the summer vacation. The average expenses in some 
of the oldest colleges, according to tables prepared by 
successive senior classes, is higher than this, running 
up to $800 or $900, or even more. But these insti- 
tutions afford the student of limited means multi- 
plied opportunities for self-help. There are many 
instances where bright boys have been able to win 
their way through, standing high in their classes and 
at the same time supporting themselves entirely by 
their own exertions. Moreover many colleges possess 
scholarships which are open to able students who 
need temporary pecuniary help. The young Ameri- 
can of narrow means, if he be of fair ability and in- 



134 AMERICAN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

dustrj, can almost always manage to find his way 
through college. 

THE COLLEGE IS AMERICAIT 

The college lies very close to the people. Distinc- 
tions of caste may manifest themselves occasionally, 
and yet the college is stoutly and we believe perma- 
nently democratic. Its relation to the better side of 
our national life has been profoundly intimate from 
the beginning. The graduates of Harvard and Yale 
in ^ew England, of Princeton and Columbia in the 
Middle States, and of the College of "William and 
Mary in Virginia contributed powerfully to the 
formation of our Republic. Edmund Burke attrib- 
uted the " intractable spirit " of the Americans to 
" their education," and by this he meant the college 
education. " The colleges," wrote President Stiles 
of Yale shortly after the Revolution, " have been of 
signal advantage in the present day. When Britain 
withdrew all her wisdom from America this Revolu- 
tion found above two thousand in 'New England only, 
who had been educated in the colonies, intermingling 
with the people and communicating knowledge among 
them." John Adams of Harvard delighted to find 
in President Witherspoon of Princeton " as high a 
son of liberty as any in America." Hampden-Sidney 
College in Virginia, founded about the time of the 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 135 

Revolution, incorporated in its charter the following 
clause : " In order to preserve in the minds of the 
students that sacred love and attachment which they 
should ever bear to the principles of the ever-glorious 
Revolution, the greatest care and caution shall be used 
in selecting such professors and masters, to the end 
that no person shall be so elected unless the uniform 
tenor of his conduct manifest to the world his sincere 
affection for the liberty and independence of the 
United States of America." And from that day to 
this the collegiate spirit and the national spirit have 
been at one. Rightly, indeed, did our appreciative 
French visitor. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, perceive 
that the place to find " the true Americans " is in our 
college halls; " Zes vrais Americains, la base de la 
nation, Ves'poir de Vavenir.^^ Scarcely one in a hun- 
dred of our white male youth of college age has gone 
to college. But this scanty contingent has furnished 
one-half of all the presidents of the United States, 
most of the justices of the Supreme Court, not far 
from one-half of the Cabinet and of the national 
Senate, and almost a third of the House of Represent- 
atives. 'No other single class of equal numbers has 
been so potent in our national life. 



FEB S3 1907 



LIDMAMY Ul- UUNCjHbbb 





007 378 087 1 



